


Leng, Fabled Plateau of Converging Dimensions

by MGroach



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Fate/Grand Order
Genre: (I hope), Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Catholic Guilt, Christian Character, Crossover, Descent into Madness, Gen, Lovecraftian, POV Alternating, Past Violence, Psychological Horror, Self-Esteem Issues, but also plenty of fun, for multiple characters, it's gilles so yknow, updates weekly now that I have my shit together
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-25 02:09:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 37,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22008232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MGroach/pseuds/MGroach
Summary: After the events of Salem, Chaldea is carrying on in a gloomy limbo, with Ritsuka and the Servants trying to enjoy the last of their time together before it all gets shut down--but then Ritsuka disappears under inexplicable conditions just as Holmes is discovering that Raum's ritual had unexpected repercussions. In the confusion, some unlikely Servants become the heroes of the day, a mysterious traveler makes her return, and Chaldea itself becomes the site of a dimensional disaster to rival any Singularity.(Tl;dr Salem sequel and Lovecraftverse crossover)
Relationships: Gilles de Rais (Saber) & Abigail Williams (Foreigner), super slight background ritsuka/mash
Comments: 37
Kudos: 57





	1. Dream-Memories of the Qliphoth

**Author's Note:**

> I re-read the entire collected works of HP Lovecraft while I was waiting for Abby to come out and goddamn it I had to do something with all this useless Lovecraft passion. I'm not sure I can promise this is going to update on a schedule per se but I'm not the kind of person who likes to abandon projects so it'll probably go along at a slow but steady pace!!

_Archer/Robin Hood_

“Has anyone else been having really wacked-out dreams lately?”

Robin Hood let his breakfast tray drop unceremoniously onto the Chaldea cafeteria table, making his bacon and eggs--and the Servants sitting there--jump.

“Nothing any stranger than usual!” Mozart said serenely. “I even managed to come up with a new sonata while I was sleeping. I haven’t written it down yet, but maybe I can punch it up a little--”

“You haven’t even written it down yet?” Cu Chulainn said. “You’re bullshitting us.”

“Do I really have to hear language like this first thing in the morning?” Martha snapped, while Mozart grinned impishly. “...And no, Robin, I’ve been fine.”

“No, I sort of get what he means.” Cu scratched the back of his neck. “I just feel on edge lately, and I don’t know why.”

“Maybe it’s because we’re just waiting to get shut down at this point,” Martha sighed. Everyone murmured in agreement.

After a morose silence, Cu spoke up again. “It’s deeper than that, though.”

“Yeah, yeah!” Robin pointed his fork at him. “It’s like there’s some danger I haven’t put my finger on yet. Like being stalked through the woods.”

Martha and Mozart shrugged.

“Must be some man-of-the-woods thing. We wouldn’t know anything about something so brutish, right, Martha?” Mozart lifted his teacup to his lips with one pinky extended dramatically. Martha rolled her eyes.

“What about you, Baron?” Robin directed his question to the far end of the long table, where another Servant sat alone. “You haven’t said anything much.”

Baron Gilles de Rais--the Saber--sat away from everyone else, with nothing in front of him but a cup of coffee that was almost white with creamer. His gaze flickered across their faces, as if he was waiting for one of them to tell him to go away. Robin couldn’t bring himself to like the guy, but sometimes he did feel sorry for him.

“...It wouldn’t be anything new for me to have troubled dreams.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

They all ate in relative silence after that. Maybe it was because the last Rayshift had been hardly a week ago, and now it was only a matter of time before the end. What was there to talk about anymore?

Martha glanced at the clock hanging on the white cafeteria wall. “Almost time for daily Mass. Are you coming, Gilles?”

Gilles nodded, abandoning even the pretense of drinking his coffee. Mozart got up as well--Robin knew he always played the piano to add some music to their little services. It was something to give structure to the nightless and dayless Antarctic bastion of Chaldea. The divisions between churches had dissolved here, and whether they had been Catholics, Protestants, or something too early to have a name, all the good Christians here marked their mornings with a pious gathering. That dodgy Japanese kid rallied them all together into a meeting room and they did whatever Christians do, for about an hour, every morning they could manage.

It wasn’t Robin’s cup of tea, and he couldn’t pretend to trust it. He felt closer to the spirits or whatever sitting under a big yew tree than in a chapel full of folding chairs. Here in climate-controlled pristine white Chaldea he could hardly feel the breath of nature. Sure, they cultivated food in some really depressing agricultural chambers, but he could really use an honest-to-god forest right now.

The heebie-jeebies from last night’s dream wouldn’t leave him alone. When he rubbed his eyes, he could still almost see the nameless squirming forms, like something that had been born outside the sheltering arms of Earth’s ecosystem, coaxed into being by an alien god.

An alien god. Yeah, that was a good way to put it. It reminded him of what they had glimpsed in that courthouse in Salem. Maybe it was because he was a Servant--a protector of human existence--that he couldn’t forget about that thing.

When the whole magic generator of Chaldea was shut down, and he was returned to the Throne, where would those memories go? Would those festering half-imagined outer Things stay in his mind and remain part of his Spirit Origin forever?

He hoped not. The idea of it felt unclean somehow.

Put off by the thought, Robin picked at his bacon noncommittally until the clawed red hands of a certain passing oni tried to swipe it off his plate and he had to fight to defend his hard-earned food, finally forcing himself to finish it.

Just when he was clearing his plate away, Mash trotted in, her hands drawn into tight nervous fists close to her chest.

“What’s up, lassie?” Cu asked, although everyone in the room could already tell.

“Looking for Master?” Tamamo asked brightly from the other side of the room. “Let me text Kiyohii~ She’ll know where she is!”

Cu barked out a laugh at the expression on Robin’s face.

While Mash waited, she shifted her weight back in forth in a kind of nervous hopping dance. It wasn’t like he paid a huge amount of attention to it, but Robin was observant by nature--Mash and Master had been even closer than usual lately, practically inseparable, like they were clinging together. He didn’t blame them, either. What would happen to the two of them when this whole thing ended? Mash had only seen the outside world in crumbling dystopias and distorted histories, and might not even live to be twenty without a Heroic Spirit’s powers. Master was a normal girl who had missed out on two years of normal life. What did they have outside Chaldea’s walls?

Nothing. Only each other. He could understand clinging to someone like that. Mash hovered around the cafeteria, too distracted to make conversation with any of the other diners.

Robin’s eyelids drooped, though he tried not to let them. He didn’t want to fall back asleep, not today. The weird vibes this morning must be messing with his internal clock. This should be just after peak breakfast time, but he felt like there were too few Servants milling around today, almost as if something was keeping them busy, like something was going on. _Maybe there’s something wrong with me...I should ask the other guys who went to Salem if they’ve been feeling screwy too...though that doesn’t explain Cu...fuck it. I’ll take a cold shower and start this whole weird morning over again…_

A cutesy jingle rang out through the cafeteria and Tamamo elegantly put down her green tea to pick up her phone. She looked at it, tilted her head, and frowned.

“Kiyohii doesn’t know where Master is.”

_\--_

Da Vinci presided over an uneasy crowd in the Command Room, a tightly packed gathering of what had to be every Servant in Chaldea, as well as the actual human staff. Robin had found himself between Nitocris and Astolfo, who insisted on bouncing in his seat and humming to himself despite the tenseness of the situation.

“So let me get this straight,” Da Vinci was saying to the three women standing at the center of the room. “None of you have been able to ascertain Ritsuka’s location this morning?”

Kiyohime, the Hassan of Serenity, and Minamoto-no-Raikou all shook their heads glumly. Poor Serenity was trembling--Robin had always kind of liked her, as a fellow poisoning aficionado.

“I brought her some warm milk and offered to sing her a lullaby last night, but she refused again,” Raikou said with a hint of wistful sadness. “So I waited outside her door in case she needed me in the night…and then she never came out of her bedroom in the morning!”

“I settled down to sleep under Master’s bed at exactly 10:25pm,” Kiyohime said. “And by 11:01 the gentle sound of her breathing had lulled me to sleep as well…”

“I watched over Master under the cover of darkness for the entire night,” Serenity said. “But…” She seemed afraid to go on.

“Huh?!” A puff of smoke burst out of Kiyohime’s mouth. “Wait, what do you know? Withholding Master-related info is against the terms of our truce!”

“I’m sorry!” Serenity protested. “I would have told everyone! But I didn’t want to make a report until I had more information, and even then I…” She bowed her head. “I still don’t know what happened to Master last night...The Great Founder will surely take my head for my inexcusable failure!”

Da Vinci tried to quell the uproar, finally giving up until it ended on its own when a bang like a matchlock pistol going off resounded through the air.

“Serenity. What do you even mean you ‘don’t know’?” one of the Elizabeth Bathories asked with an indignant huff.

“Excuse me, Elizabeth, I’m asking the questions here,” Da Vinci said. “Serenity! What do you even mean you ‘don’t know’?”

“I couldn’t wrap my head around where she went! It was like one moment she was laying there asleep in bed, and the next, she was no longer in the room. As if it were some kind of illusion or magecraft...but she was gone so completely I couldn’t even feel our bond anymore.”

In the next quiet moment, Nitocris gasped. And then Robin felt it too, like once someone pointed it out, it suddenly became so obvious.

Of course he had been uneasy this morning, of course everything had felt off, of course so many people’s routines had been diverted away from the cafeteria--

Fujimaru Ritsuka was gone.


	2. The Impossible Tome

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this is a good time to mention I've grailed Saber Gilles to 100
> 
> (Also: since Gilles is one of the main POV characters, there will be descriptions of past violence throughout his POV scenes, especially since he might have some Lovecraftian sanity slippage going on. That said I'm not tryna write some grimdark fic and you should expect about the same level of creepiness as the average Fate work or Lovecraft story.)

_Saber/Gilles de Rais_

Though when he was awake he could avoid it, Gilles was haunted by them in his dreams. The little blonde heads. Rows of them, floating and ethereal in the darkness of the quarters where he had barely slept in those latter days, but only plumbed the depths of human depravity, plunged his hands in the innards of sin and torn then out until the name he bore had become a byword for sadism and degenerate artistry. He had been borne along by grief at first, but the more he had tried to quell it the more he lost his original purpose, until only that feeling of orphaned loss persisted. Prelati had told him that Jeanne had always been meaningless. That he had only needed the gentlest push to fall this far. Even now he almost imagined he could hear Prelati’s soft, insistent voice encouraging him back to those depths.

If Prelati were here now, he would tell him that the “Gilles de Rais” he was now--the Saber of Chaldea--was a fluke, and the real Gilles was that looming wraith, that disgustingly pale and fish-eyed thing that sometimes swam in front of his vision in dreams where he watched himself commit his crimes.

Gilles knew how his fellow Servants saw him. That other self, as it walked the halls of Chaldea, was something between a joke and a terror, and he himself was an afterthought. Hardly a Knight of the Round Table or a Paladin of Charlemagne, he was a man in slightly tarnished armor with a sword that didn’t even have a name in particular, famous for being a footnote in Jeanne’s quest and then a horror story. He wasn’t a Berserker, thank God, but he might as well be. Madness Enhancement was in his Saint Graph and he feared it poisoned him more every time he fought.

He tried to do what he could to be useful, if only in a small way; and keep himself busy when he couldn’t be useful, in hobbies and prayer. Everyone could surely tell he was running himself ragged anyway.

Thank God for daily Mass. He didn’t think that that Oriental priest boy could actually consecrate a Host, but all of them were dead anyway. The songs Amadeus played for them on the piano were past his time and he had never heard anything like them, but he understood that they were beautiful. And kneeling elbow-to-elbow with lords and saints in the utilitarian chapel of a bunker was far closer to Heaven than he ever deserved to get.

But Mass was cut short today.

“Could I get all Servants to the Command Room?” Da Vinci’s voice came with remarkable clarity over the loudspeakers. “Again, yes, that’s ALL Servants to the Command Room.”

“All of us? We’re going to have to get into spirit form to fit...” Sanson said mournfully.

“Master probably just got spirited off by some busty girl. She always turns up again sooner or later with such charming stories to tell.” Saint Georgios seemed not only unconcerned, but even delighted by the idea. “Why, I wish I could come along.”

“It’s probably some pagan goddess…” Saint Martha grumbled. “There’s so many of them around here.”

They all sat in a loose group near the bottom of the stadium seating, so they clearly saw the strained look on da Vinci’s face as she interrogated the three women who had seen Ritsuka last. Gilles glanced worriedly at Jeanne when Serenity gave her testimony. The Holy Maiden was tense, frowning, but not shaken, not like Serenity was. He took heart from her reaction. She was his faith crystallized. If she was fine, so was he.

The meeting was adjourned after the formation of loose search groups led by volunteers of various tiers of commitment. No one was sure how Master could have disappeared so thoroughly. Of course, there were any number of possible answers.

“Even if she’s Rayshifted…” Yan Qing said, laying across a couch in the breakroom, “usually we can still tell that there’s a contract, right? But I feel like a rogue Servant right now.”

“You practically are a rogue Servant,” Atalante muttered.

“Even if Anchin’s contract with me was severed, I’d still be able to track her down,” Kiyohime boasted, puffing up her chest. “So I’m not worried. I’ll find her no. Matter. What~” She punctuated the threat with a flurry of texting. “Okki better come with me or I’ll drag her out!”

“It’s unlikely that anything short of magic from the Age of Gods could sever the bond between a Master and a Servant. Ritsuka’s a capable girl, and I don’t see a reason to be concerned, so…” Lord El-Melloi II exhaled a long trail of cigar smoke. “I’ll be in my room until someone inevitably needs me.”

They watched him go with the weary steps of a man who knew his tutelage was in high demand.

“...I guess I should go talk to that other Jeanne and other Gilles, wherever they are,” Jeanne sighed, prompted into action by El-Melloi’s departure. “They might have a hand in these strange events. Even if their motives are always opaque to me…” She glanced over her shoulder at Gilles. “Would you like to come with me, Gilles?”

After the dream he had had last night, he was reluctant to come face-to-face with that version of him. Jeanne saw it in his face.

She smiled at him. “I understand. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

Her smiles towards him were always so thoughtlessly warm and kind, like she had never expended a single thought towards his sins and the blasphemy he would become. Gilles couldn’t understand it, only marvel at it. This was a true saint.

Still marvelling, he wandered out into the hallway, thinking maybe he would find another group to attach himself to, if they would have him, and was hit full in the chest by a bouncing pink blur.

“Ow! Oh, it’s Nice Gilles! See ya in church, buddy!”

“Mass is already over,” Gilles said, disoriented. Teetering back a few steps, he saw that it was Astolfo, the girlish Paladin of Charlemagne. Gilles had never really gotten a chance to talk to the flighty boy, but the snide voice of Prelati in his head told him they’d get along.

“Man, I keep missing it! What day is it on?!”

“Sunday...Mass has always been on Sunday, always,”

“...Oh yeah, that does make sense! I don’t have any common sense, though~ Hey, since you ran into me, wanna hunt for Master together?”

“I...suppose. You are a holy knight in your own way, so I would be honored to benefit from your guidance.”

“‘In my own way?’ I’m super a holy knight! Saint John and me were totally buddies! He’s the one that lent me Elijah’s flaming chariot so I could get Roland’s wits back, after all~” Astolfo bounced ahead. “Anyway, I wanna hang out with you! I bet it would be fun! Probably ‘cause I have no common sense~”

He reached back and grabbed Gilles’s hand, and with a surprising amount of strength and no warning yanked him forward so he felt like his arm was getting pulled out of his socket.

“W-wait--Sir Astolfo, where are we even going?!”

But he didn’t mind getting whisked away, in a way. Honestly Gilles envied Astolfo’s carefree nature. If going mad was always like that, he might not mind slipping into it, himself.

_Caster/Helena Blavatsky_

“I’m just saying, with the sufficient amount of electromagnetic energy, if a sort of vortex or ‘hole’ could be created--”

“Preposterous, not to mention wasteful and useless! I can’t believe I have to say this, but not everything can be accomplished with electricity, you foppish daydreamer!”

“Ms. Blavatsky, lend me a hand here. This meatheaded capitalist refuses to consider that the human spirit of ingenuity and creativity, if--”

“Mr. Tesla, Mr. Edison, please! What you’re describing is similar to the Operation of Parallel Worlds, which is a True Magic. If you could open a pathway into wholly alternate universes with nothing more than a big magnet, some mage would have tried it by now! Do you have any idea how much energy it takes Chaldea just to Rayshift within our own timeline?”

“Yes,” they both said.

Helena sighed. “Man, if the two of you had managed to collaborate in life, even if only once…”

“An unlikely possibility, as I can tell you already know,” another voice said from behind them.

Helena turned around. “Mr. Holmes.”

“Madame Blavatsky. I’m glad your mind has already been turned to theoretical happenings and unlikely occurrences, for I have something of the sort to discuss with you.”

“Oh? Are you finally curious about the teachings of the Mahatmas, Mr. Holmes?”

“Alas, that’s not it. I would like to consult with you about something similarly obscure, however--I suspect a woman of learning like yourself will be familiar with it.”

Helena puffed up her small chest with pride. “Well! We’ll have to see about that! What is it?”

Holmes raised an eyebrow. “With all due respect to your enterprising companions, we’ll walk and talk. No need to let this fall on others’ ears.”

“Yes, of course.” Helena gave a farewell nod to the inventors, along with a silent prayer that they would get along in her absence. As soon as they were a sufficient distance away, she asked Holmes a question she already knew the answer to--”Does this have to do with Master’s disappearance?”

Holmes answered with another question. “Are you familiar with the Pnakotic Manuscripts?”

“Huh?” At first, she struggled to place it. But then, as if something was unlocked, the knowledge came to hear as easily as any other esoteric text she had known in life or as a Servant. “Yes, of course I’m familiar. Why?”

She thought she already knew. She and Holmes had met on the subject of hidden worlds and lost societies before, and the Pnakotic Manuscripts was one of the few remnants of known literature from such a society--once thought Greek in origin, there were some enterprising scholars (including herself) who instead believed in a far more ancient period of their creation, a time before humans had emerged as the Fifth Root Race.

“So was Marisbury Animusphere.” Holmes’s voice, though quiet enough to avoid attention from passersby, held a weight that made every syllable clear. “And when he built this observatory, on the cold dark peaks of the world’s nadir, he was not the first to observe the stars from that place.”

“Well...with a confluence of leylines like this, I’m hardly surprised.” Helena tucked her hair behind her ear.

Holmes nodded. “You don’t seem like you’d be surprised at all if I told you those ancient builders were not men, Madame Blavatsky.”

“Of course not.” Helena smiled slyly. “Especially since I’ve heard Antarctica used to be a jungle. I bet there was a huge thriving metropolis down here! In fact, it’s strange no archaeologists have given it a shot, but I guess no matter how hard you try, some men of ‘science’ refuse to be open-minded, even though the Mahatmas are one hundred percent trustworthy sources of information and absolutely real--”

Holmes raised an eyebrow again, but gracefully let her continue to vent her frustrations as they rose to the top. Helena let herself rant until they came to a room, the door of which he opened for her to enter.

“Eh? Your bedroom, Mr. Holmes? Sorry, I’m only interested in tantrism in theory.”

Unrelated to her joke, she wrinkled her nose. Holmes was one of those men whose inner greatness was not reflected in the condition he kept his surroundings. Books lay open in piles across his desk and shelves, clothes were hung on anything that could serve as a hanger, the walls were sometimes used as notepads, and a gun and a violin both lay out of their cases as if neither of them were expensive or dangerous.

“I prefer to treat it as a study where I occasionally fall unconscious.”

“Yeah, I can tell.” Helena looked around for an uncluttered seat and, failing, perched on the arm of a chair.

“As I was saying. I’ve recently picked up an English-translated edition of the Pnakotic Manuscripts from the Chaldea Library for a little light reading. English translations of this text are quite rare, and I was surprised to find a copy here in this Antarctic outpost…”

“Master is missing,” Helena reminded him.

“My apologies, Madame Blavatsky. I’ll cut to the chase.” Holmes steepled his fingers. “I think Master’s latest and last adventure in Salem had some unforeseen and lingering consequences, and I didn’t want to be caught off guard if my suspicions proved correct. Viz, my other recent reading material.”

He flopped a yellow-paged magazine into Helena’s lap.

“‘Weird Tales’? I didn’t take you for a reader of pulp trash, Mr. Holmes.”

“Don’t question this one. Question the Pnakotic Manuscripts, because, Madame Blavatsky, that book does not exist.”

“What?!” Helena remembered the sensation when she had first thought of that book, as if a key had turned a lock in her mind. “Don’t mess with me like that, Holmes, if you think I’m a fraud just say so!” She thumped her petite fists on the upholstery of the chair.

“Hold on, hold on,” he said hastily, ducking into his coat a little. “I was going to say--it does not exist, except in the pages of this pulp, and even then only as scattered and disparate references--and yet, I’ve been reading it!”

“...Where’s your copy?”

“Right here.” He produced the volume from the clutter on his desk. It was bristling incongruously with neon sticky notes, but other than that, looked as if it had been published no later than the 17th century.

Helena flipped through it with hands that were used to poring through books many centuries older than her. The stories in here were cryptic, cruel, and bafflingly familiar; they were something her Masters the Mahatmas had guided her to study while she had traveled through Central Asia in life. How could it be fictional? Hadn’t it formed a building block in her Theosophy?

“...Raum’s ritual is affecting even us here in Chaldea?” she muttered.

“The alternative is that this is a coincidence, and what we are now experiencing is more akin to an eclipse...the quiet passing of one universe through another, as in the celebrated ‘Mandela effect’.”

Helena nodded and reluctantly tore her eyes away from the old book. Stranger things had happened in Chaldea. Something about having so many Heroic Spirits in one place made it a nucleus of chaos.

“Indeed, I would not even bring this to your attention if not for that singular nature of Chaldea’s physical location--”

As Holmes spoke, all the lights went dark. And his voice, like a stopped record, ended.


	3. The Lurker in the Dark

_Assassin/Hassan of the Hundred Faces_

The Hundred Faces, as diverse as they were, were united in their desire to recover Fujimaru Ritsuka and their arrogance that they could do it. If she was in Chaldea—and maybe even if she wasn't—she could not escape their notice.

After all, they thought to each other, it was unfair for her to be snatched away in the dead of night so close to the end of their days together. In their separate ways, each and every one of them sympathized with Serenity. Of all the humans they had met, it was only Ritsuka who had readily accepted their condition and took it in stride, befriending each of their faces as she met them and not being overwhelmed when she saw them all at once. And she hadn't ever treated them as mere tools to carry out assassinations or espionage, something that they were sure none of their previous employers or Masters had done. So they spread out, separating into 88 separate bodies, and infiltrated every part of this vast facility.

It was truly huge, almost mind-boggling. The building had been intended for so many more people than the skeleton crew it was forced to operate with right now, and entire wings were left abandoned. Yet when the Hundred Faces had been summoned into Chaldea, that skeleton crew had been the summation of human life on Earth. Outside, human history had been incinerated, and time itself had had no meaning. The staff of Chaldea had had to create it themselves, living out artificial days and nights marked by timers that went on and off at regular intervals; even now, with human history supposedly restored, the world outside was hardly worth considering. It was a freezing wasteland devoid of life.

Although—there was a Hassan who had whispered of a man he had once heard of, a madman who had written a rambling tome called _Al-Azif_ and then died horribly in broad daylight, screaming as if torn to shreds by thousands of invisible insects. That book had spoken bizarre and unreasonable things about the land of Antarctica, its inhabitants, and certain anomalies and horrors that marred its snowy slopes.

_Useless to think about now_ , one Hassan scolded the others. _Even if such things do exist, Master wouldn't have gone outside the facility. She must be here._ The alternative was beyond the Hundred Faces's many realms of expertise. So there was no use thinking about it. No need to waste their many minds that were already stretched thin, trying to hold back the chaos of so many persons fighting for thought. The electricity flickered and died, and even then they reminded each other to stay on task, that other Servants knew much more about these electric machines and there was no need to be distracted. They thrived in the dark. It wouldn't affect them.

And then a Hassan gave the distress call.

It rang through 87 minds. Every Hassan, no matter how far away or how engrossed in their own search, poised, prepared to return through the omnipresent shadows to the compromised fragment.

Yet when they did so they were struck by a paralyzing fear.

Every Nizari assassin who had gained the title of “Old Man of the Mountain” understood the fear of death. It was Death incarnate who trailed their footsteps, who watched from the shadows, who took their head should they transgress. Death was familiar to an assassin. But the fear that held them to the spot now was not a fear of anything as friendly as death.

It was something beyond. Something unspeakable. Something their poor brother couldn't even comprehend enough to send the idea of it to the rest of them, only the emotion it caused, the bottomless, gibbering terror. 87, no, somehow hundreds of voices cried out, shouting over each other, panicking—they were lost. Though they were many minds they were one Servant and so surely the madness of one Hassan would infect them all. They were already lost.

The Hassan that had been exploring the deepest sub-level of Chaldea had secured a sepulcher for them all.

_Saber/Gilles de Rais_

As far as Gilles could tell, Astolfo lived his life in a kind of perpetual slapstick skit, so that when the power flickered and then fizzled out it seemed perfectly normal to him to jump into Gilles's arms without any warning. Gilles screamed, but just a little.

“Zoinks,” Astolfo said, by way of explanation.

Astolfo's intuition had led them to the food storage warehouse, which, with its cavernous size and looming shelves full of precarious packages, felt to Gilles like one of the worst places to be stuck in the dark. (It also felt like one of the worst places to look for Master, but Gilles hadn't dared question it, especially with Astolfo's hand clutched on his like a vise.)

“Do you have a light?” Gilles gingerly put Astolfo down.

“Ummm…taking inventory of all my Noble Phantasms...nope, sorry.”

“We'll just have to go carefully back the way we came.” Gilles placed a hand on the end of a shelf and tried to get a handle on their surroundings.

“Do you think if I yelled there would be an avalanche?”

“...no, Sir Astolfo.”

“Phew.”

Gilles himself was prone to worrying at the best of times, so he sympathized—until he heard Astolfo taking in a deep breath.

“YOO-HOO! MASTER! YOU IN HERE?!”

Astolfo's high-pitched voice reverberated back at them in waves, and Gilles cringed as the echoes washed over them.

“...I really don't think she is,” he protested.

Astolfo blinked and looked around even though it was pitch black. “Well, I know something is in here.”

“Weren't the Hassans spreading out to search Chaldea? Perhaps it's one of them.”

“Ooh, do you think I unlocked a secret skill that lets me bypass Presence Concealment?!”

Deep in the warehouse, a box clattered to the ground.

“No.”

“Yeah, me neither.” Astolfo placed a hand on Gilles's back and started to steer him. “Even I know we should probably get back upstairs, y'know.”

“Agreed.” A Servant or staff member would have called back to them, and Gilles highly doubted that Astolfo's voice had gone unheard. Maybe it was just nerves, a lingering, primal fear of the dark, that made him want to get back to where he knew there were people, because as a Servant, he couldn't think of anything in this warehouse he should logically fear.

Of course, there were always illogical things.

Astolfo was humming as they walked in lockstep around the shelves, in no direction that seemed consistent.

“Where are we going?” Gilles hissed.

“I just think it's fun to turn,” Astolfo whispered back. As if to demonstrate, he sharply turned them both as if it was a dance step.

“Oh for God's sake--” Gilles tried to shake Astolfo off, but Astolfo was grabbing his arm too hard. In the corners of the dark, something shifted, like a maggot wriggling behind dead flesh. “Let's get back upstairs. You and I both know Master's not going to be down here anyway...” He was glad Astolfo had a hold on him or he might have been far more unreasonable. The dreams he had had last night had been vague and unsettling, and he wanted to get back to Jeanne. Even now, he was walking faster without meaning to. (Astolfo didn't seem to mind.) He really needed to get out of his head, and stop imagining that the darkness was roiling and things he couldn't see were beginning to see him.

They nearly bumped into a shelf at least a few times, but at last their awkward three-legged-race burst into the basement hallway. Astolfo cheered.

Gilles shut the door behind him, not wanting anything in the storage room to get out—if there had ever been anything in there.

“Alright, where should we look next?” Astolfo asked, bouncing in place.

“I think maybe we should take a break from looking,” Gilles said. The dark hallway echoed, and the air felt uncomfortably still and already cold. None of the many machines that usually kept Chaldea's human inhabitants safe and alive in the harsh polar environment were whirring. Something was wrong.

“Okay! Fifteen minutes and I'll be good to go. I can tell we're getting warmer!”

“...I'm almost certain we are not,” Gilles mumbled.

“Are you sure?” Astolfo turned around to meet Gilles's eyes and his kitten-y smiling face seemed to glow moonlike in the dark.

Then, like an animal hearing something in the distance, Astolfo whipped his head around so hard his braid swung through the air.

“Yooo! We're down here!”

“Really!? Who's 'we'?” An answering voice Gilles struggled to place echoed down the stairs. That youthful but measured tone spoke of a Servant, and so did the soft patter of small shoes down the stairs.

A girlish figure came into view, lit faintly by darting, whirling oblong lights. Gilles thought he knew that particular magic, but it was confirmed when the shadow huffed and conjured a large, heavy book into view.

“Let's get some more light in here...'Darkness radiates light, and light drops a solitary ray into the waters, into the Mother Deep'!” The hallway flooded with light from nowhere. “There we go.” Helena Blavatsky frowned at them. “What are you two kids doing here?”

“Granny Helena! We're looking for Master,” Astolfo said readily, while Gilles confessed that he didn't really know.

“Okay, great. Next question: Have you tried looking for anyone else?”

“Ooh, who else is hiding?!” Astolfo squealed.

Blavatsky put her hands on her hips. Her spellbook, rather than falling, faded when it was no longer being touched. “How long have you two been fooling around down here? This is strange behavior for you, Baron de Rais.”

“I know,” he said, still exhausted from his strange bout of terror and merely being in Astolfo's presence. “What's going on upstairs, Madame Blavatsky?”

“Nothing!” She raised her eyebrows and threw her hands in the air. “And I mean nothing. It's dead quiet up there. I sent Colonel Olcott to look around, but it's like everyone is gone. And I'm pretty sure the generators are down here, so if some of the staff was trying to restart them, my mini-Kumaras would have alerted me to their presence. Plus, you know, it's not like they'd be trying to hide...” She sighed. “It's like we got hit with some vanishing plague. Mr. Holmes disappeared while I was talking to him!”

“Damn, and they took our power with them!” Astolfo didn't seem overly concerned, like it was all a game to him.

“Well, that's the thing, our power can't be all out or we'd be feeling it too. Our magical energy is provided by Chaldea too...” Blavatsky seemed intrigued but not terrified, not like Gilles suspected he would be when it dawned on him just what their circumstances were. Everyone upstairs? Gone? “Unless...well, we should get a handle on our situation before we go making any assumptions, right? Let's go see what's working.”

Gilles followed after her confident strides, not wanting to be left alone in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All of Helena's spells that she'll be using in this fic are taken from The Secret Doctrine. Unfortunately my copy is abridged but there's still plenty of enigmatic poetry fragments and lines I can take out of context to use for spellcasting!


	4. Foul Machinations

_Foreigner_

She had been cultivated in a foul cradle, in a garden tended for the coming of a forbidden advent. And she had grown strong. When her growth had been too far stunted by her constraints, she burst free. Now, she had traveled wide, and she had seen so much.

She had been to the peaks of Hatheg-Kla and stared boldly into the stars to see what had twisted the mind and taken the body of Barzai the Wise. She had felt in the dark what slept in the depths beneath the pyramids. She had haggled with, under her uncle's watchful eye, the shifty merchants that hawked rubies and slaves at the port of Dylath-leen, and she had played with the prosperous cats of Ulthar.

(She liked the cats the best.)

Everything had been so wonderful. Life is like an endless, playful dream. She knew that, as the Key and the Gate, this was her privilege.

_You're a child of the gods,_ her uncle had said to her one night as they watched the burgeoning moon rise over the tranquil river Skai. _You can walk anywhere you want._

She had hugged Hugo to her chest, upsetting the small black kitten that had curled up in her lap. _I know. I've been so blessed._

They had been traveling together for so long now, years and years by human time, so he'd caught the dark look that flitted across her face.

_You don't need to blame yourself for that anymore. You're so far past it. It happened so long ago, you can let yourself forget it._

She nodded, tears glittering in her eyes. Her uncle had told her this more times than she could count, but she still never seemed to absorb it, the kind words never sinking into her mind. She was blessed with so many wonderful things, but she had never stopped, deep down, wanting to be punished.  It was something she thought she'd carry all the rest of her endless days.

_Uncle, I think I want to travel on my own._

_Oh? And go where?_

_I want to go find the Ringmaster again. I don't think it'll be hard. She still has my silver rosary._

He didn't ask her if she would be alright, because he already knew she would be. He had to worry about these things, but not her. She could go wherever she pleased under her Father's watchful eye, and even the Outer Gods knew not to bother her.

Yet, even knowing that, Uncle Carter looked so tense. It was a funny image, since he was so covered in cats.

_We've discussed before where your friend the ringmaster lives._

_Yes, Uncle._

Abby petted one of the cats absently. She'd never understand it. Miss Ritsuka had seemed like a clever witch—but she must be truly brave and well-protected indeed to make her home on the very Plateau of Leng.

_Saber/Gilles de Rais_

Blavatsky's mini-Kumaras guided them along the dimly lit utilitarian corridors of Chaldea's underground, and Gilles and Astolfo blindly followed, not sure what they would find or why they were helping her in her self-decided mission; there was just nothing else to do for it. If all of Chaldea was mysteriously abandoned like she said, what else could they do but try to understand the situation one step at a time?

Although, Gilles doubted that Astolfo, at the very least, thought that much about it.

“I wish Mr. Tesla and Mr. Edison were here,” Blavatsky sighed. “There's no field of magic that's really beyond me, but when it comes to the really technical, mechanical stuff, I always end up feeling a little out of my depth...Ah, looks like this must be it.” The mini-Kumaras had stopped in front of a plain sturdy white door, and she stopped too, so that Astolfo bumped into her. “Okay, let's see if I can diagnose these electrical issues!”

She turned the handle and opened onto a vast, silent darkness.

From that darkness, Gilles felt the same sense of foreboding he had felt in the food storage warehouse. A feeling like the abyss was alive, populated, like the void at the bottom of the ocean, or the vast reaches of space—

How had he learned those places were populated, anyway?

The mini-Kumaras darted into the room and Gilles followed his companions out of the omnipresent light Blavatsky had filled the hallway with. When Blavatsky saw the array of techno-magical machinery, she grimaced.

“Who went and did this?!”

She motioned for the little lights to illuminate everything from different angles, trying to get a complete picture without viewing it all at once. Gilles saw glimpses of twine woven through still-rotting animal skulls, scattered stone fetishes carved in shapes and symbols that were primitive and odd, delicate gold machinery twisted and drenched in unknown fluids. The fluids were omnipresent: yellow, green, and colorless slimes he could hardly guess at the origin of. Magic had been worked here, but it didn't look like a magic any Servant of Chaldea specialized in.

“Ooh, what's this icky thing?” Astolfo reached out to one of the idols.

“Aah, don't touch it!” Blavatsky swung wildly at his arm to knock it away. “Sorry for yelling! But I want to get a better look at everything. My first instinct is to call this sabotage, but I don't know who did it or how.” She chanted another spell from her Secret Doctrine, and the vast size of the generator room was completely illuminated. Gilles reeled at the scope of it. Most of the room was taken up by an intricate, golden device that no doubt utilized the Animuspheres' techniques to draw power from the movements of the heavens and convert it into mana. And all of it was rearranged, twisted up, and despoiled by rites that looked as if they had been done in service to an exceptionally foul power. His whole body shuddered as if even biologically he was inclined to hate it.

Blavatsky was flipping through her spellbook, frowning now and then.

“Can you fix it?” Astolfo said.

She nodded. “I understand the base principle of the generator implicitly. 'As Above, So Below'. The movement of the heavens, the divine breath, the universal 'that', Fohat! All very Mahatma! Of course, there's a big difference between 'basically' understanding something and having Knowledge of something, especially magic, and we don't really have time for me to immerse myself in classical astrology as taught by the Clock Tower from the ground up. So! Instead, I'm going to ask for the guidance of my Teachers.”

Gilles was slightly worried, considering that the popular opinion in Chaldea was that the Mahatmas were most likely a treasured fantasy of Madame Blavatsky and not 'real' in the conventional sense, but he supposed that in the world of magic there was room for all kinds of things. Like whatever did this.

“Can I get you boys to help while I set up a Workshop with plenty of wards so I can fix this? Whatever else happens, we'll benefit from having a safe place to retreat to and not having to run around in the dark. I'm not sure what spells are built into these...things, after all.”

“You want us to do Magecraft?” Gilles asked.

“Nah, I just need you to stand watch outside. I'm going to retreat into myself to receive the guidance of Mahatma, and it would be distracting to have this one bouncing off the walls.” She looked at Astolfo. Gilles understood completely.

“Bouncing is what I do! Pyon pyon!”

“Okay, you can do it in the hall.” Blavatsky opened her spellbook, to a page that she seemed to know well. Then, with assured power filling her girlish voice:

“Let us propose the names to be given to the Continents, on which the four great Races were born, lived, and died.

The first terra firma on which the first Race was evolved by the divine progenitors:—

The Imperishable Sacred Land.

The Hyperborean will be the name chosen for the second Continent, which received the Second Race.

The third Continent we propose to call Lemuria.

'Atlantis' is the fourth Continent, and the island of Plato was only a fragment.

And the fifth Continent is America!

Our fifth Root-race now prospers across the face of the Earth. Firm in my belief, I declare this space a sanctuary for communion with the Hierarchy, the Great White Lodge.”

Before their eyes, the defiled generator room filled with a warm celestial light. Patterns, as if drawn by invisible hands, began to trace their way across the ceiling and walls, and even the floor seemed to be subtly changing under their boots. Slowly, Madame Blavatsky's warm and eccentric spirit was permeating this filthy space. Gilles exited to the hallway reluctantly. He and Astolfo took positions on either side of the doorway, like sentries.

“She's a surprisingly formidable woman,” Gilles said. “She'd make a good general.”

“I know right? Like, 'yes ma'am! All according to Mahatma!'” Astolfo snapped into a military salute. “We're lucky she's the only one left!”

“Yes...” Gilles's brow furrowed. Standing out here, he could feel the difference in even the air outside and in. It felt colder out here, spiritually speaking. “Do you think she's right about that? About everyone being gone?”

“Well, Granny Helena is really smart about magic stuff, and she's not sketchy like some of the witches and mages around here. So yeah, I believe her.”

“I suppose something major is happening again, then...”

“Heck yeah!” Astolfo danced in place.

“...I know strange events take place in Chaldea all the time, but I still don't understand how you're so calm about it.”

“It's because my wits are gone, so I don't know any better than to be optimistic! And I like exciting fun things, so to me, it's just like another one's starting!”

Gilles smiled despite himself. Astolfo's reaction was so unlike anything he could fathom that his confused mind was starting to find it endearing. As if being in his presence was acclimating him to his weird version of reality.

And why shouldn't he? His heart pounded in his chest. When he had first met Jeanne, he had felt that same sense of the veil lifting, and the full joy and strangeness of life being exposed. Now, as a Servant, he rarely found himself at the center of things, with his humble desire to stay by Jeanne's side and the high cost of his strength meaning it was unwise to push himself too far.

Remembering that put a damper on his excitement. He didn't want to more clearly hear the voice of his old friend Prelati, who snidely whispered in his ear when they were alone, but only faintly. The voice tried to give him encouragement, to give into urges he didn't feel—not yet, anyway. And he hoped he never would.

If it were up to him, he would have picked a different flavor of exciting occurrence. The disappearance of Master was bad enough, but the disappearance of Jeanne and the other Servants, the power outage, the disgusting ritual an unknown mage had done, and on top of it all, the unsettling familiarity of last night's dreams. He could have done without all of that.

No matter. He touched the hilt of his sword and stood up a little straighter. He bore the title of Marshal of France, and nothing could take that away from him. He was a Servant of the Saber class. No matter what awaited them, it would be fine.

As he thought that—

The air in front of him began to crack, bend, and break.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Helena's Territory Creation spell is adapted from her explanation of the historical rise and fall of different continents at the beginning of Volume Second: Anthropogenesis...VERY adapted
> 
> The Secret Doctrine isn't so much a mystical text as it is a long, rambling, pseudo-scientific blog post


	5. The Visitor From Beyond

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! I knew chapter updates would be sporadic but I wasn't expecting the circumstances that led to this one being delayed. I actually wanted to put one more scene in this chapter, but since I didn't want to delay it even further, this chapter and the next one will be an exposition dump in two parts lol.

_Saber/Gilles de Rais_

Gilles was rooted to the spot, watching something that Astolfo seemed not to see.

In the simple white hallway, space itself distorted horribly in a way so unnatural it made him sick. A fetid smell accompanied it, rot and filth covered up by the cloying scent of roses, growing stronger as his impression of reality itself unwrapped and the hideous, impassive void yawned beneath. Gilles doubted his eyes. Surely this was a waking nightmare, or a punishment for optimism.

From the blackness between the stars where it punched through the texture of reality, something was dropped, as if an invisible creature from outside of nature itself birthed a thing into the world.

Tentacles, horribly corporeal and fleshy, writhed forth from space and wetly deposited what they had borne onto the floor. At first, he couldn't grasp what it was, but then it unfurled its mocking form.

In the nucleus of the slimy feelers, like a lure on a predator, glowed the pale body of an adolescent girl. Her bare skin had such a grey cast and her frame was so emaciated that Gilles thought she was surely dead if she was real.

But then she started to move, hopping out of the tentacled embrace and then taking another wobbling step on the ground. The tendrils that had carried her slid back to where they had come in the cold void.

It was bizarre to watch her walk towards them on her spindly legs. She wore nothing but a cluster of tattered bows and ribbons that hung around her neck, along with a precarious, overdecorated hat. Her arms and legs were just slightly too long to be natural, and ended in blackened talons. One claw clutched a pristine stuffed animal to her naked side.

As she got closer, Gilles could see her eyes were red. Then she opened her pale mouth and spoke, and he heard that her voice was airy and dreamy. But he couldn't comprehend the words. He was seized by a horrible terror.

Gilles sunk to the girl's twisted feet and vomited.

_Caster/Helena Blavatsky_

Within the Temple she had created, Helena Blavatsky retreated within herself, to become one with the Hierarchy of the Ascended Masters. _Breathe in and out. In the same way, the universe itself breathes; with each exhale, a world is created. With each inhale, it is brought back to rest. So it is taught in the Book of Dzyan._ By eliminating herself, she became more. It seemed like a paradox, and yet, nothing was more natural, true, or correct.

In her mind's eye she could see them, the shining Hierarchy, the Masters who had guided her since her youth. Though not even dear Olcott had known her secret while she lived, she had never actually aged past the time she had first met them—the moment she had first been reached by that wise and fatherly voice, the life-energy had suffused her soul so much that she would forever remain young, a wondering and untamed child of the heavens who fled her marriage and escaped into the secret hills of Tibet.

Her Masters descended down the shining staircase from the etheric realm of Venus to the haven she had created for them to manifest in. She greeted them without speaking. _Master Kuthumi, Master Morya._ They were as familiar as fathers, as comforting as childhood stuffed animals, turbaned men with impossibly warm and perceptive eyes.

She didn't need to tell them anything more. In their soft, cultured voices that only she could hear, they guided her while she, as if she was in a trance, fixed every part of the elaborate machine. At times, though she knew only her hands were moving, it felt like they even manifested to assist her physically, wiping slime from a golden gear, gently bending an implement into shape.

Finally—“I think it's done,” she said eagerly. “Naturally, it was drawing its power from the ascent of Mars—and now it's been improved by the Mahatmas to receive an extra boost of strength from Venus, the most spiritually advanced planet in our solar system! You've really outdone yourselves, my Masters!”

But when she turned to look at them, hoping to maybe receive a pat on the head, she saw that her Masters' serene etheric faces were marred by troubled expressions. She instantly stood at attention. “What's wrong? Master KH, Master M?”

“Upasika,” Master Kuthumi said in his usual gentle way. “We have trained you well, helped you develop your extraordinary powers since your youth, and myself and Master M both put great stock in your abilities. So please, listen to us when we say that right now we fear for you.”

Master Morya elaborated in his forthright and authoritative way. “Upasika, something from the great fertile Darkness between Breaths has torn its way into this world of Light. This is an impossibility. And yet, it has happened.”

“Wait, what?!” She looked back and forth between them. “There's things living out there?! You never told me that when we were writing the Secret Doctrine! That book was supposed to have everything!”

“That knowledge is not for the unascended beings of Earth to know,” Master Morya said sharply. “I myself did not learn of them until I had Ascended and joined with Lord Sanat Kumara in the Hierarchy of the Great White Brotherhood—It is knowledge of the Outside, and has no bearing on us Within.”

Master Kuthumi carried on. “Imagine that revered and profound symbol of the Yin-Yang. The white has now been pierced by a fragment of the blackness, and the blackness is seeping in.”

 _It's just what Holmes was telling me about._ Helena nodded her understanding.

“When you step out of this Temple, Upasika, this manifestation of the great Motion itself will be unstable, in flux. Keep your wits close and your beliefs closer. Because when the world itself is madness, it is _the act of believing in order_ that creates order. Understand?”

“Yes. Of course I understand, Master.” Deep down, nothing was more true to her childish heart. When her extraordinary Magic Circuits had jolted to life in a freak act of nature, and she had been frozen into perpetual girlhood, only her belief in Master Morya had helped her make sense of a magical world she knew nothing of.

Master Morya spoke as if he knew what she was thinking. “As long as you keep that headstrong spark alive, and believe in our power and the power of Lord Sanat Kumara, nothing of the insane Outer World can touch you.”

Before they retreated from her, back up into the shining light, each of them placed a hand on her shoulder. And then they were gone—but, no, they were never truly gone. They were always with her.

With her convictions firm, Helena stepped out of her Temple, into the uncertain and mad outer world.

Immediately she was hit with a wall of sickening foul odor, like mold and crypts and rotting flowers. The light she had infused the hallway with was faded, something that shouldn’t have happened for another seven days at least.

And Astolfo was kneeling on the ground, next to a crumpled Gilles. Someone else was there, a girl Helena was sure she’d never seen before. She had to be a Servant, right? She looked ordinary, but Helena sensed a great power slumbering in her, a power so vast it was almost repulsive.

Helena summoned her tome to herself, preparing for a confrontation. “What happened? What did you do to him?”

The girl’s eyes flickered with fear, and she cringed.

“Nice Gilles got sick and ralphed! It was probably the smell,” Astolfo said.

“I’m so sorry,” the girl pleaded. “I promise I didn’t mean to scare anyone or do anything bad.”

Seeing those tearful blue eyes, Helena reluctantly unsummoned her Doctrine—it was never far when she needed it. Something about being a Servant just made her really weak to kids.

“What’s your name?”

The girl immediately heartened a little when Helena changed her tone. “Abigail. Abigail Williams. You can call me Abby.”

“Are you a Servant, Abby?”

Abby hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Well, were you summoned?”

“N-no...I came here myself.” Abby glanced around. “Pardon me for asking, but what’s going on here, Miss...”

“Blavatsky. I’m Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. This is Astolfo, and Gilles de Rais. All of us are Servants.”

“Are you Servants of Miss Ritsuka?!” Abby exclaimed.

“Yeah!!” Astolfo volunteered without a second thought. “You know her?”

“Yes!” Abby’s face was glowing. “We met in Salem, Massachusetts! And...well, a lot of things happened there, and she helped me out so much, and so now I came to visit her, but...what’s going on?”

“That’s what I want to know!” Helena said. “For one thing, how did you get here, and—“ She shook her head. “Wait, wait, can we do this inside the Temple? The Mahatmas told me something bad is happening, so I want to make sure we’re somewhere safe before we let our guard down and talk.” _Plus, if we’re in any danger from you, I’ll be able to draw on my powers to their fullest._

“Who are the Mahatmas?” Abby asked.

“Don’t,” Gilles croaked.

They entered the Temple she had made of the generator room, Abby clutching her stuffed bear to her chest, and sat on silk cushions that had appeared on the floor when Helena had transformed it into her ideal magical workspace. Helena summoned a few Olcott dolls and set them to preparing tea.

“Alright,” she said. “So, Abby? You met Master—Ritsuka—in Salem?” _So you’re_ that _Abby._

_So Holmes was right._

“Yes. I’ve been traveling with my uncle since then. But then I started traveling by myself. And so I wanted to see Miss Ritsuka again, but...I feel like something bad is going on.”

“Something bad _is_ going on!” Astolfo jumped into the conversation the instant she wavered. “All our power went out. And everyone else is gone. And, oh yeah, before all that, Master went missing!”

Abby’s mouth opened in surprise.

“Abby, I’m sorry to assume things, but I had heard some things about you when Master came back. Do you know what’s going on here?” Helena pressed. She offered a cup of chai tea to soften the blow of her inquiry. “A colleague of mine confided in me, just before everything happened, that your adventure together with Master might have had some lingering effects. He thinks—thought—that two separate planes might be overlapping here, or something like that, and the Mahatmas just warned me of something similar. Does the phrase ‘dimensional hole’ mean anything to you?”

“Um, ah, um,” Abby held her tea between her long-sleeved hands and blinked a couple of times. “I’m sorry, Miss Helena, but I don’t really know much about magical things...b-because I’m not a witch...but...” She set the hot cup down and hesitated. “I mean, of course I know about dimensional holes. That’s how I got here. But Miss Helena, how is this the first time you’ve seen the dimensions shift on the Plateau of Leng?”

She ducked her head, like she had been rude for asking. Helena was baffled.

“Abby, what do you mean, the Plateau of Leng?”

“It’s...it’s where we are...” Abby said. “It’s where Chaldea is.”

Another piece of the puzzle fell into place and with it Helena’s sense of foreboding increased. The Plateau of Leng was mentioned many times in the Pnakotic Manuscripts that she had both read and not read. It was a mythical location that was implied to be in Tibet, or so she had enthusiastically read into it. The poems and pieces that mentioned it colored it as an eldritch and forbidding place. Of course, to her mind, the unknown was not necessarily terrifying, so she was sure it was fine.

That said, if it was the reason for the rift that had split Chaldea, she was inclined to view it in a much less friendly light.

“Wait, wait, what’s the Plateau of Leng?” Astolfo said, looking back and forth between them.

“The Plateau of Leng is...well, this is all hearsay, but it’s a place where the Textures of the world overlap. Astolfo, you know about Textures, right?”

“Sure I do! Probably!” Astolfo said.

“More than Textures, some even say parallel worlds come together and get mixed up there. It was once thought to be in the Mystery-rich Himalayas, but, um...by the time I got there, it had...moved. It’s not that it wasn’t real or anything!”

“My Uncle Carter says it’s been in at least three places at once. The Himalayas, the Antarctic, and the Dreamlands of Earth. It’s like an idea of a place,” Abby added.

“Kind of like Shangri-La,” Helena agreed. Astolfo nodded enthusiastically. Gilles looked lost.

“So, um...if this is the first time you’ve seen the dimensions shift right over Chaldea, Miss Helena, you wouldn’t know that everyone else probably, um...is just on the other side of the rift, I think…” Abby said.

“What does that mean?” Gilles pressed. He seemed to be regaining his strength, no doubt helped by the cup of tea pushed into his hands by some helpful Olcotts.

“It just means that right now, there’s two Chaldeas instead of one. Maybe even three. And everyone is just split up. You’re just the only ones that are in this one.” She seemed emboldened by having three adults—more or less—listening to her. “My uncle would say, ‘Imagine the tilting of a kaleidoscope. The things being viewed break and separate, and eventually come back together. On the Plateau of Leng, everything is always tilting.’”

Everyone seemed to let out a collective sigh of relief.

“So it’s not them we have to worry about,” Gilles said. “It’s us?”

“What about Master, then?” Helena said.

Abby’s bright expression dimmed. “She’s, um...she must be in this one. I found you all by following...I mean, she has something that belongs to me...”

They fell into a contemplative silence. Helena was forced to consider the fact that she really had never heard the Plateau of Leng mentioned without words like “foul” appended to it.

“Hmm, let’s all take a five minute break before we ask the next big question, okay?!” Astolfo said. “Eyecatch! Commercial break! How are you feeling, Nice Gilles?”

“I’m feeling a little bit better. Thank you for asking.” Gilles was caught off guard enough that he just responded to the question.

“Nice! Granny Helena, can I have a cup of tea too? Extra milk and sugar, please! Do you have any cookies?”

“I don’t. Sorry, Astolfo.”

“Abby! It’s great to meet you! Thanks for dropping by!” Astolfo shook her hand, then turned and stared into space, bouncing in his seat.

Everyone just sat and listened to the sound of hot water boiling in the teakettle in the corner. Gilles seemed ill at ease with sitting on the floor, and kept shifting his weight around, glancing at Abby now and again.

“Has it been five minutes yet?” Astolfo said.

Gilles smiled slightly. Helena tried not to. “Okay, okay. It’s no use beating around the bush. Abby...if Master is here, where exactly would that be? And how did she get there?”

Abby fiddled with her stuffed bear, looking into its eyes as if for strength.

“Since you mentioned her disappearing before anything else happened, she was probably taken. On purpose.”

“By who?”

“There are...these goat men who live in the Dreamlands around the Plateau of Leng,” Abby said. “Some of them could have gotten in.”

“Ooh, goat men,” Astolfo said.

“But they wouldn’t have snuck in...they are brutes. If Chaldea is as highly protected and wonderful as Miss Ritsuka told me, I’m sure they wouldn’t have been able to breach it, not without a big battle...”

“And there wasn’t one. Master just disappeared. She was there, and then gone,” Helena said. “It frightened everyone. Serenity—who was there—said Master vanished.”

Abby kept her eyes focused on her bear, thinking. “May I see Miss Ritsuka’s room?”

“Of course. Let me lead you there!” Helena stood up. But Abby shook her head and stayed seated.

“Um, if it’s all right. I want to go by myself...I can take care of myself, I promise...”

Helena exchanged glances with Astolfo and Gilles.

“I mean, you did get here by yourself, I suppose...but you don’t know where it is,” Helena said.

“Then can Miss...Mr? Ah...” Abby turned her clear blue eyes to Astolfo. “Um! What should I call you?”

“I’m just Astolfo! Just call me Astolfo, okay?!” Astolfo sprung to his feet and saluted. “Here, come on, Abby! Let’s go for a walk!”

“Take some Olcotts with you,” Helena called after them, motioning for a few of the little dolls.

_And tell me what she does in there. I want to see the magic she got here with._

Helena didn’t take her eyes off Astolfo and Abby as they left the boundary of her workshop, holding hands like they had been friends for years.

“She looks like a sweet girl,” she said to Gilles.

Gilles said nothing.

 _Yeah, I guess he wouldn’t want to_ _talk about a child_ _, would he? Even if he is a Gilles de Rais from before_ _all of_ _t_ _hat_ _._

Helena had read of his exploits in the dark days after that saint had died. After all, he had been recorded in history as a mage of legendary effort, if not skill—but it had been sinister magic. Literally sinister, the Left-Hand Path. Helena couldn't conceive of magic for such selfish ends, didn’t see the point in mindless indulgence and all-consuming hedonism. What had he been learning, besides new and creative ways to induce suffering in children? His alchemy had never produced anything. It was a fool’s errand to try to really make gold with those teachings without seeing the metaphors in the spellwork. His shadowy mentor, that dodgy Prelati, should have known that.

It was hard for her to wrap her head around. Looking at the Marshal now, sitting tall and dignified even as he recovered from his illness, he didn’t look like such an evil, stupid man.

Well, she knew better than anyone that people weren’t always what they seemed. And there was nothing as effective as magic for baring the soul.

Helena poured herself another cup of tea and drained it even though it was hot. _I really wish I could have seen Abby’_ _s_ _magic_ _._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: According to later Theosophists, Master Morya was King Arthur in a past life. There's a lot to learn about the Mahatmas! A lot of the "lore" of the Mahatmas (also called the Ascended Masters) was actually developed by Blavatsky's followers who built upon her work after she died. But since FGO incorporates that later writing into Helena's magic and personality (Sanat Kumara, for example), I had to do the same even though Blavatsky herself may not have approved of the overtly magical bent of this later stuff; to her, the Mahatmas were living flesh-and-blood men who lived in Tibet and communicated with her psychically, and not advanced or ethereal beings. Later Theosophists reconciled this by portraying them as kind of like Bodhisattvas, and said that after they helped Madame Blavatsky with her writings they ascended to a higher plane and left this earth.
> 
> One reason why I wanted to include Helena in this fic (other than because I love her) is that Theosophy, and in particular the idea that other, advanced societies lived on Earth long before humans, was a big influence on H. P. Lovecraft's work. Of course, Lovecraft portrayed this as terrifying and madness-inducing. But to someone like Helena, it would just be invigorating and exciting.


	6. The Revelation from the Unseen Father

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been 100 years, I was mostly writing this fic to kill time on the bus to and from work, so when I started working from home I had time to work on other stuff instead! But with the reveal of Summer Abby I couldn't take it anymore and had to start writing this again...I did warn at the beginning that updates would be sporadic!!

_Foreigner/Abigail Williams_

Abby was happy to follow after Astolfo through the anonymous cold hallways of Chaldea. He was so cheerful, even though it must be hard to see his home all lonely and empty. Abby liked that about Servants, from the ones she had met. Even if they were very strange, like Nezha, they were all very kind. She thought they must be beings overflowing with God’s love for His people.

“And that’s where Arjuna tripped on a mini-Nobu. And that’s where RiderToki drove his motorbike through the wall. And that’s where I saw Tamamo Cat’s boob! Oh, but it’s not there anymore, of course!” Astolfo was pointing over and over to empty rooms as they passed them,  walking with skipping, bouncing steps. “Wow, I guess Chaldea is pretty boring with no people in it, huh!”

“No!” Abby shook her head. “Even like this Chaldea is wonderful! It’s like a city all indoors, I’ve never seen humans make anything like it!”

“Ooooh, yeah, it’s like a giant anthill!”

“Oh! Yes, I suppose.” She was thinking more of the underground settlements of f lying polyps , or the frozen monoliths of the Old Ones she had seen in deep dreams.

“ Here we go!” Astolfo ran up to a door that looked like all the rest. “Our Master’s humble abode~”

Abby hesitated at the door handle. “May I go in alone?”

“Yeah! If you need me just holler!”

Abby internally breathed a sigh of relief. She entered Miss Ritsuka’s room. It was a plain room like the inside of a white box, with furniture that would have made the people of Salem proud. But it felt very warm. There were things scattered around, items Abby didn’t understand the use of that seemed important and made it feel lived in. Abby even thought a pleasant smell was lingering around that reminded her of being hugged.

She closed the door and just soaked up that comforting feeling for a moment.

Then she began to pray.

“ Ygnaiih... y gnaiih...thflthkh’ngha.”

She didn’t know what the words meant. They had come to her in prayer.

_ I hold the Silver Key. _

Abby closed her eyes and, with nothing more than a wish, felt her consciousness slip away.

_ C ome forth from nothingness. Open the lock. Oh Father, my God. _

Underneath it, there was something deeper. Another part of her. A part of her that was connected to her Father, an  eternal proto-Abigail that was undefined by illusions like time and place and identity, an avatar of the Outer God. In his image, she had been born again.

_ I will become an incarnation of its essence. _

She wasn’t scared of it, since she was under the watchful eye of the God that had given it to her. The watchful, many-lobed and burning eye of God as he crouched and watched from the Outside. The Knowledge of him surged up into her, so much that her physical shell felt sick. Poor, pitiful shell.  She had endured so much torture and  yet was still so naive, so unspoiled, not yet knowing  the true suffering  she so yearned for . But if she lingered there in what she wanted, she would drown in it. Her Father called her deeper, further. Along the rose-strewn path, into the dream,  to the very mouth of the Final Gate.

Father, she thought-spoke to the Presence. _You are the All-Seeing One, outside of all time-space and witness to it. What did you see in this room?_

She easily let the Outer God bear her mind away. To look through his eyes—rather, because he had no eyes as beings of flesh had, to understand as he understood—was too alien and therefore too horrifying for lesser men to comprehend. Almost no one could look through these eyes and retain their sanity. _“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the_ _Lord_ _. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”_ It was just as she had been taught.

And, as the thought-emanations of her Father began to touch upon her being, she recited another verse.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou _art_ with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”

Yes. She understood truly when her mind was unlocked like this. By her faith, she was saved.

Abby’s Father showed her everything she asked to see. Time and space were nothing to her, nor were the kaleidoscopic dimensions.

So she saw, and she knew.

She saw the foul things no one had observed to give a name to, as they heaved their way up along ancient b ut newly uncovered passages. She saw the subtle unwholesome magics they had worked to open doors in the angles of Miss Ritsuka’s room.

They had lingered and bred and grown strong and loathsome here at the pit at the bottom of the world, and no one but her Father had seen their blasphemies and the dark prayers they had offered to the Presence that loomed in the abyss beyond the mountains of madness.

And when Raum had bridged the gap between the “fictional” and the “Real”, and Chaldea had been slotted into place over top of them, they had moved like plants to the light, and the light was Miss Ritsuka. Bright, shining with the bonds she had made and the powers she had connected to. The foul things had wanted that light for their god, the god they feared that waited in the ultimate heights of the Plateau of Leng.

 _Look to the moon,_ her Father told her. _At the bottom of the world, they look for the fullness of the moon. For His descent._

The instant he let her go, Abby’s eyes snapped open.

_What are they going to do at the fullness of the moon?_

Abby thought of cruel rumors she had heard of South Pacific savages with grotesque abyssal gods.

She burst from the room. “Astolfo, what phase is the moon in?!”

“Waxing gibbous,” Astolfo said without missing a beat. “47 hours and 25 minutes til it’s full and that’s when I REALLY go cuckoo for cocoa puffs!”

Abby didn’t understand, but she was grateful that he knew so easily.

“Why?” Astolfo rocked on the balls of his feet and swung his arms.

“We need to find Miss Ritsuka by then. My Father said...”

As she said it, Abby understood why she had felt such comfort around Astolfo from the moment she had met him. A touch of joyous madness swirled around him, like the madness of an old and experienced dreamer.

She was still shy, though.

“...he said something bad would happen.”

Astolfo nodded. “So, what do we do now? How do we find her?”

“We go down...They writhe under the earth. We go a long, long way down.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really bad at dividing things up into chapters which is why this one is so short and the next one is twice as long


	7. The Forest of Dead Spires

_Saber/Gilles de Rais_

Abigail Williams had returned from the upper levels of Chaldea with a steady look in her eye, Astolfo skipping and weaving behind her. From there, she had explained the course of action they needed to take, with assurance that was admirable in a child.

They were going to leave this empty Chaldea behind, and descend beneath it, however far they needed to go before they found Master. And they were racing against the moon.

Gilles was admittedly used to following the whims of a girl who spoke with authority she didn’t deserve, and she was the only lead they had right now. “Very well. Should we prepare to leave now, then?”

Madame Blavatsky rested her chin on her hand. “It’s better than sitting here. This room is proof there’s some kind of outside actor, so we might as well listen to what she says.”

Abigail beamed in relief. Her face was so honest and ordinary, it made Gilles miss the fields of France. “Thank you! Thank you, Miss H elena !”

They gathered supplies from the upper floors in one tight group. Gilles wasn’t clear whether that was to keep tabs on Abby or because her stories of dimensional rifts and mysterious shifting plateaus had made them more nervous than anyone was saying.

He glanced over his shoulder at Abigail, unable to help himself. She was so normal-looking now, he couldn’t wrap his mind around how she had appeared to him when she had arrived. Had that been a hallucination? Was he further gone along his path of madness, even as a Saber, than he liked to think? The only other witness had been Astolfo, who he doubted would even blink at the Abyss itself.

Abigail smiled nervously at him, and he realized he had been staring at her. He shook his head and went back to the work of putting boxes of snacks into a duffel bag (Astolfo’s request). She went back to watching Madame Blavatsky draw a magic circle on the floor.

“When this is all set up, it’ll allow the Olcotts to pass us supplies we didn’t think of bringing, no matter how far we are,” Blavatsky told her.

Abigail nodded, watching silently.

“Do you have any experience with magic, Abby?” Blavatsky asked. “You seem interested in it.”

Abigail retreated a little, hugging her toy bear to her chest. “Not much.”

She might have regretted leaving it at just that, so she added, “I just like watching you draw your circles. Your magic seems very kind, Miss Helena.”

Gilles almost missed the rare sight of Blavatsky smiling bashfully, as if charmed or flattered. “Well! You’re very perceptive, Abby. My magic is only possible through the kindness and unbounded love of my Mahatmas.”

“The Mahatmas again!” Abigail said. Blavatsky smiled and took in a deep breath, but just then Astolfo barreled in from the hallway.

“I got a whole ton of blankets!” He dumped them precariously close to the chalked edge of the circle. “It’ll be cold down there!”

“Cold probably doesn’t even start to describe it,” Blavatsky said.

“But won’t you be fine?” Abigail asked. “You’re Servants, and you have all your power, right?”

“That’s right! There’s nothing holding us back like in Salem!” Blavatsky said. “We don’t even really need these...”

“Fluffy stuff is just fun!” Astolfo said.

“Don’t worry about us, Abby,” Blavatsky said.

Abigail nodded obediently.

The four of them bundled up in standard-issue parkas and put together packs, like a pastiche of human Antarctic explorers with only a secondhand knowledge of what they were supposed to need. Some guesses were smarter than others. For instance, Gilles was sure that no matter what Astolfo wanted, they would never need or be able to use a rice cooker.

“An electric kettle would be nice, though,” Blavatsky said wistfully.

Finally, after Blavatsky gave her lined-up Olcott dolls a firm talk about protocols to be adhered to in her absence, the four of them shouldered their packs and drew up the hoods of the thick coats they didn’t really need. One nice thing about being a Servant was that Gilles could rest assured that his armor could be summoned to his form without even a thought, no matter what was waiting for them down here. A sword and magic resistance seemed much more useful than a coat in any circumstance. Especially since, despite Abigail’s cryptic hints, he had no idea what was down there.

 _Oh, I think you might have some idea,_ Prelati’s voice said as a faint echo in the back of his head.

They returned to the basement, past Blavatsky’s workshop that was still emanating its Eastern-tinged protection and calm. Somehow Astolfo had ended up at the head by literally skipping to it. He was followed by Blavatsky. Abigail hovered around the middle of the group, and Gilles found himself bringing up the rear.

“There’s a hole there,” Abigail said, pointing to the entrance of the food storage warehouse. “Back there. A hole, or a leak.”

Astolfo whipped his head around to make eye contact with Gilles. “I knew it!”

Gilles nodded grimly.

As they entered the vast and freezing cold room, he was relieved that they could turn on the lights and free it from the oppressive grip of darkness. Even with the lights on, it wasn’t a cheery place, long rows of anonymous boxes on utilitarian shelves that felt like a cave masquerading as a real room. And darkness never really left the corners.

In one of those corners an artificial avalanche had taken place, scattering boxed supplies and knocking over shelves, and not quite covering what was unmistakably a hole in the stone wall. As they approached, cautiously like something might leap out at them, Gilles could see that it had been carved or worn open from the other side, through undiscernable tools.

Abby looked back at Gilles as if to confirm he would stay with them.

Astolfo and Blavatsky shone a high-powered flashlight down the hole. “This is going to be a tight fit,” Blavatsky said apprehensively. “I mean, most of us should be alright, but...Baron, you’re really tall.”

“Can’t you cast a shrinking spell on him or something?” Astolfo said.

“I could probably alter his Saint Graph to make him younger,” Blavatsky said boldly, “but we don’t have that kind of time,” she finished before he could protest. And thank God for it, because he didn’t want to have to explain how much of an awful brat he was in his youth.

In the end they crawled into the stone hole with the freezing walls, Astolfo first, just the same as they had been in the hallway.

“Nobody stare at my butt. I know it’s cute, but don’t do it!” he warned, which made Abby giggle nervously as if she wasn’t sure she should.

It was a claustrophobic crawl, but the worst part was not being sure when it would end, or if it would ever end. Gilles could handle being hunched over on his hands and knees in the rank darkness for a moment, or even a few moments, but something about closing his eyes and feeling his way without knowing if or when the journey would ever end—reciting the rosary in his head without beads to occupy his mind, and not knowing how many loops around it would take before he could stand again—it unsettled him. It was like something out of a dream of darkness.

“I promise it ends,” Abigail murmured just ahead of him, as if she read his thoughts.

“Have you been down there before?”

He thought he saw her shaking her blonde hair, but it was hard to tell with the flashlight blocked by crawling forms. Maybe she realized he couldn’t see her. “I haven’t gone this way before, but I’ve seen what’s at the end.”

“What’s at the end?”

“Awful, crawling things,” she muttered.

Hearing that, he was almost glad that the tunnel seemed to force them forward.

The tunnel ended abruptly, as Astolfo announced by tumbling out of it with a squeal.

“Shh,” Helena said, through her concern.

They got a grip on their surroundings as best they could. It really just looked like a cave—the rock around them was greenish and tinged with permafrost. Besides the pervasive cold, there was the smell. It was almost like the smell Abigail had brought with her, fetid and rotting, but without her strong smell of roses.

Astolfo sniffed the air like an animal, like he was trying to track a smell within the web of awful smells.

“You think you can pick up on something?” Abigail said.

“Yeppers!” Astolfo pointed ahead. “Follow my nose~ Master is this way!”

“There’s only one way to go anyway,” Blavatsky said.

And they walked, still following Astolfo for some absurd reason. Gilles didn’t have any idea how Blavatsky felt, not even to mention the Abigail girl, but surely in any group, the level of cheer Astolfo boasted was unnatural.

Gilles felt that Abigail kept glancing back at him, and though he tried to stop looking at her completely, even to the point of walking with his head turned, soon, to his horror, she fell back to match his pace.

“Um...Baron?” she said, the word obviously strange in her mouth. “I’m sorry for frightening you earlier.”

He found it in himself to smile gently at her even with the mixed feelings he had of her.

“Don’t worry about it, Abigail.”

“Call me ‘Abby’, really. Please. You’re Miss Ritsuka’s Servant, so we’re friends.”

“Oh. Yes, of course.”

She looked like she wanted to say something else to him but decided against it, and ran back ahead to Astolfo.

For everything Abby had said about terrors and lurking things, the way they traveled was uneventful. The tunnel was just uneven enough that they had to watch their step, but not quite difficult enough to feel like they had to put all their mental energy into it. That was its own kind of draining, so they didn’t talk. Gilles had plenty of opportunity to entertain himself by inspecting the terrain and was starting to suspect that th is  was a natural air pocket of some kind, frozen into place millennia ago and comprised of superfrozen ice as much as greenish stone. It wasn’t a very riveting line of thought but he had a certain amount of fun making it. By now he had seen and thought more of the Antarctic regions than any other man of his era. That was ego-gratifying, if  existentially  terrifying.

He never expected to be able to test his theory. And yet, when they came into a sudden wider cavern from the tunnel they had been crawling, he felt that it was surely supported.

A forest of spires, as if from a cathedral sunken in frozen earth, rose out of the clearing in front of them. The smallest was at least twice as tall as Gilles and looked almost natural in its construction, like the dried-out exoskeletons of long-dead sea creatures; too delicate to have been created so much as grown. As soon as Blavatsky saw them she dashed up to investigate like a child on a school trip—Gilles could practically see her eyes lighting up even from behind.

“ Is this—yes, of course it is! I sense an unbelievable amount of Mahatma from these s tructures !” she said in an excited pitch that echoed dangerously in the large chamber. “Olcott—oh shoot.” She r emembered he was upstairs and  started to speak into the lapel of her oversized coat. “Guess what I’m looking at right now, Olcott. That’s right! Undeniable  physical constructions of the earlier Root Races, right here under Chaldea! And at such an early stage of the expedition! You’ve got to send me a camera if you can find one, Olcott! Check St. Georgios’s room!”

Astolfo sized the spires up. “Chaldea was on top of this the whole time, huh!”

“Only sometimes,” Abby said.

Astolfo dashed around to view the structures from different angles, and ended up running laps around the unholy fixtures for no good reason. “Oh yeah, Abby!” (He disappeared behind one.) “I just remembered, I’ve been wondering!” (He ran out of view again.) “Are we going to all get snapped to different dimensions randomly again?” (His cape was seen briefly across the cavern.) “Or get kidnapped by whatever?”

Abby shook her head. “We’ve descended past the chaotic zone. The dimensional fields are more stable here.”

Blavatsky was i nspecting the strangely twisted surfaces of the spires, and mapping out their distribution on the frozen floor of the cavern. Abby started following her with curiosity. Gilles found himself left alone at the entrance to this unnatural frozen forest and had no choice but to follow.

Abby’s voice echoed. “Miss Helena, you would love my Uncle Carter, and I’m sure he’d love you too! You’re both so smart, and you love strange old things...I hope you get a chance to meet...”

But as they traveled, though Gilles was sure he was keeping pace, her voice and all other sound seemed to fade from his hearing, as if someone had snuck up behind him to cover his ears. It was a passing thought at first, but as soon as he had seized upon it, he realized that that was certainly what had happened—that someone  _had_ been following him, and they had clamped their feather-light but strong hands over his ears and now they were pressing in as if to crush his skull. He shook his head to pry himself free, r ushing forward while trying not to touch the chill and reticulated surface of those awful high-reaching spires. They were closer together now. He was in the thick of it.

Inside of his head, he heard a familiar laugh. A cruel, whimsical, thoughtless laugh that he knew he shouldn’t be able to remember yet at this age. The ‘him’ he was summoned as had never even met Prelati, let alone heard that all-too-familiar and intimately unguarded laugh.

And yet, though he knew it was impossible, Gilles had Prelati’s spellbook.

_Don’t think about it._ Just acknowledging he had the book was too far down the path of madness.  _Forget you have it!_ That was like emblazoning it in the forefront of his mind.  _Put it back!_ Remembering the book was just a half-step away from summoning it.  _Don’t open it!_ Who had ever said he was going to open it?!  The thoughts rushed in all at once and he felt that he was at the cusp of the Abyss.

Then he heard with full clarity. It was like emerging from water.  “ You’re an interesting person too, Baron,” Abby said, and her too-loud voice snapped him back to full reality. Gilles stumbled and slipped, and to steady himself he laid a hand on one of the hateful spire s. Reflexively he pulled his hand away as if it had burned him.

Looking away, he realized that Abby was nowhere in sight.

He reached the other side of the cavern with no more incident. The other three were still walking, leisurely, as if they were so intrigued they had abandoned their urgency. As for Gilles, he became more unnerved the longer he stood.  This room was freakish. Even the very patterns in the rock or ice beneath them started to feel more like long-preserved trails of things with no feet and no parts that could be called human at all—but they still moved and thought in all-too-intelligent ways. C ould he believe this cavern  was an accidental artifact of nature’s machinations? Or was it  designed and placed, a meeting hall, a hellish mudroom, a last place to gather before coming up to flop on the surface like worms in a rain?

He was glad when the others lost interest and they could finally leave the accursed room, filering again into a closer passage just large enough for them to enter two by two. Gilles still couldn’t shake the idea that it had been carved out, widened by ponderous and incessant scraping and the scratching of dreaded paws. And it was sloping just barely downward: endlessly, subtly downward.

Before he realized it they had been walking in silence for some time. They were, after all, only vaguely familiar colleagues—and one stranger—that had been thrown together by the c hance cracking of a space rift. Trapped down here with spirits he barely knew, deep beneath the desolate surface of the Earth, Gilles suddenly felt very cold indeed. The walking persisted.

Finally, Astolfo paused abruptly by a cleft in the rock that formed a natural alcove.

“What’s up?” Blavatsky said.

“ A  little birdy’s telling me that we need to take a break. A bby, you were about to ask for one, I can tell! ” Astolfo plopped onto the ground without another explanation.

Abby looked back at Blavatsky and Gilles as if checking if it was okay to stop.

“Are you tired, Abby?” Blavatsky ventured.

“ Not  really ,  but Uncle Carter always told me not to wander for days without stopping, ” Abby admitted. “He didn’t want me to forget who I was as I traveled, he said.”

“We don’t have the time,” Gilles said.

“ If you need to sleep, the Baron can carry you...” Blavatsky said hesitantly, faltering as if she realized s he didn’t trust him as she spoke. The bitter taste that filled Gilles’s mouth was almost enough to make him spit.

“The Moon says we have time,” Astolfo said into the ground.

“How long does the Moon say til it’s full, Astolfo?” Abby said.

“We still have 46 hours! Wait. Now it’s 45 hours and 59 minutes.”

“ But that’s impossible!” Gilles said. “Surely it’s been longer than two hours.”

“Olcott, can you verify that?” Blavatsky said into her lapel, as if to humor both of them. “I mean, I guess we could have a little rest. Not that we need it, but I guess I could meditate on the truths of the Mahatmas for a moment! It never hurts to refresh the soul!”

So they settled into the alcove, without dousing their flashlights. Blavatsky laid a blanket over the stone floor to ward off the cold as if making a nest. “It’ll feel good to ground myself...There’s no magic better-suited than mine to warding off the kind of threat we’re up against. The Mahatmas told me that themselves!”

“ The Mahatmas are Granny Helena’s correspondence professors!” Astolfo said from under his cape, which he had thrown over his head. As witless as he seemed, he must have sensed the danger to all of their peace and quiet if Abby asked about them one more time. “Abby, come curl up next to me! Let’s sleep like cats!”

Abby shook her head, smiling. “I’m going to say my prayers. Daily prayer is important.”

“Then I will too! Hail Mary, full of grace! Help me take a nap in this chilly place!”

With that he fell silent and made no other noises.

Blavatsky nodded and arranged herself against the wall, crosslegged. She shook her hair back from her face and closed her eyes.

Gilles did appreciate having been thrown in with such pious comrades, at least. He settled against the uncomfortably striated and unaccountably organic wall and found the string of rosary beads he had tucked away in a pocket. _It’ll pass the time._ He had no intention in mind. The Mother of God would never intercede for him.

As he began to count the prayers, speaking the words under his breath, he became aware of Abby watching him.

“Um...what are you doing, Baron? What’s that cross?”

Keeping his wavering fingers on the bead that marked his stopping point, he finished his prayer and answered her.

“It’s a rosary. It’s a devotion to Our Lady—um, that is, it’s a way of keeping track as you pray.”

She scooted closer across the ground to look at the shiny circle of beads. They were gold and blue, colors that reminded him of Jeanne. And, well, he had always had an eye for the ostentatious.

“’Our Lady’? So,” she stuttered, “you’re a Papist, Baron. I was born in Massachusetts, so I never  met any...” She had absentmindedly reached out to touch it and he was doing his best to keep his fingers in place.

“And I’m still trying to wrap my head around the different kinds of Christianity. When I was alive, there was one unified faith.” He hoped it didn’t sound accusatory. He wasn’t the best at making small talk with children, but he had always enjoyed it. It reminded him now of when the troops on the march would stop in tiny villages, and the children would stream out to meet the Holy Maiden and the knights, and he and Jeanne would let them touch their armor, their swords, even the sacred banner if they promised to be careful.

There had always been so many children. Surely a few would not be missed.

“Well, the preachers in Salem said the other Christians were too showy and vain, and didn’t pay enough attention to the Scriptures.” The glitter of the beads reflected in Abby’s eyes, and she tried to slip it over her head.

“Wait, it’s not a necklace!” The rosary slipped out of his hand and he tried to grab at it; she flinched as if he’d made to hit her.

“I’m so sorry!” Their voices overlapped.

After a breath, Gilles said, “it’s a counting tool.”

“Oh no...Baron, I made you lose count...”

“I’ll just start over at the top of the decade. Not that kind of decade,” he said to preempt her horrified reaction.

“Will you show me how you do it? Why pray apart when we can pray together? If that’s okay.”

He smiled. “Of course it’s okay.”

“’ For where two or three are gathered together in my Name, there I am in the midst of them.’ Do you know it?”

“Yes, I know it. Now, if we start at the beginning, this bead here...”

The nightmare vision that Abby had been was so unreal now. Gilles felt that prayer had purged it, and now just a girl remained, a still and peaceful presence at his elbow, watching as he prayed. He could hardly believe she and it had been the same.

He buried himself so deep in his meditations he didn’t even notice when Abby went to sleep, curled against the wall that seemed so sinister to him. Blavatsky was still sitting crosslegged, statue-like.

Gilles coiled the ornate rosary around his hands like he was trying to handcuff himself and laid himself down on the nest of blankets, away from Astolfo and Abby. He didn’t want to see the slumped outlines of their forms.

_Holy Mother, please protect me._

It was a bitterly hopeless plea.

In the abyssal depths of his mind, something had already started to move, like a stirring titan from the depths of the sea.  Like the Lxrd of the Sunkxn Spiral Cxxy. The voice that spoke that in his mind wasn’t his. It was Prelati speaking to him. Prelati was in his mind and trying to change him—Prelati was in his Saint Graph— these thoughts weren’t coming from him. They weren’t his.

They’re not. He told himself that. As if he could deny the future, he told himself that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you wanna talk about magic, the Cthulhu Mythos, Fate series, or how Abby is a precious bean, hmu on discord! mgroach#2311
> 
> I figure it can't hurt to have internet randos occasionally guilt me into continuing to update this


	8. Sightseeing in the Necropolis

_Caster/Helena Blavatsky_

Helena was still getting used to the idea of _knowing_ and yet _not knowing,_ as she had already come to think of it. Of course, being a glamorous mistress of the magical world, no strange twist of the mind was completely foreign to her, but being able to feel her brain fill with knowledge even as she attempted to access it, as if it was a modern computer loading data for her to peruse, was just a little exciting.

But now that she understood the nature of the phenomenon, she was eager to learn more about it, and save Master and expand the boundaries of magical scholarship all at once! Though of course, that infuriatingly conservative Clock Tower would find it all too easy to turn up their nose at her unorthodox findings once again—

_Woah there, HPB,_ she reminded herself. _You’re a Heroic Spirit, remember? Your days of impacting the mortal world are over, you obstinate old horse._

It was at times like this she really missed Olcott! He would doubtless remind her: for now, Chaldea was her world. And until it was officially disbanded and she was sent back to the Throne, she would do everything she could to serve and save it, and the wonderfully diverse and different people it had brought her together with.

Never mind that this current party wasn’t exactly her ideal pick of Chaldea’s best and brightest, especially while exploring sinister unknown territory. Astolfo was a virtual Russian roulette of Noble Phantasms, and as fun as he was to hang out with, she didn’t feel like entrusting her life to him even if he did have the best intentions. Gilles de Rais was more reliable, being a military man and no stranger to the concept of noblesse oblige, but she sensed a whiff of black magic on him even in this Saber class container.

She didn’t want to ask him for it, because she was pretty sure he himself hadn’t noticed he was carrying it. But she really wanted a look at that book.

_What could it be?_ she thought, with a thrill that could only come to a longtime scholar of occult lore. _Cultes des Goules?_ _De_ _Vermis My_ _steriis? Unaussprechlichen Kulten? Liber Ivonis?_ No. Considering his time period, if it was any known book at all, it had to be that most forbidden and foul of tomes: the dread _Necronomicon_. Depending on how complete of an edition it was, that unclean book might end up being more of a help than any other Noble Phantasm.

And speaking of helpful things, Helena was waiting for a chance to talk to Abby. There was so much knowledge just roiling under that girl’s skin, she could feel it. Those clear blue eyes had seen starscapes even the Mahatmas themselves could only dream of. This Abigail Williams was an innocent and an outsider. A Foreigner to the entire known world.

It was enough to make her swoon. Wasn’t planeswalking every little girl’s dream?

But, after their little break, th e makeshift group of adventurers packed up and kept trekking with hardly a word.  They had a little snack, just because it seemed like the thing to do. And now it was more creeping about in the dark. Excitement alone wasn’t enough to temper Helena’s natural tendency to feel on edge in  silence and near-total blackness. Though  their flashlights, and the cheery lights of her mini-Kumaras, did remedy that.

(“They’re a little spooky, aren’t they? The way they scoot around,” Abby had said shyly, as an attempt to make small talk. Helena was hardly miffed, but a little baffled.)

Now, Helena wandered a bit ahead of everyone to observe the strata of the rock in peace. Secretly she wanted to discover a fossil if at all possible.

As she walked, she noticed something that felt like her imagination at first: light that she wasn’t providing. Light, and the barely perceptible movement of air that ruffled the fur lining of her coat. She trotted ahead, picking up the pace and letting her faithful satellite fall behind to the others, as she no longer needed it.

To her surprise, as she ran into the growing light, the corridor was sloping downward. Finally, her eager feet hit a sudden drop, and an abrupt change in the quality of the stone.

The tunnel they had been walking had just ended. Empty space fell away beneath her boots.

Helena couldn’t help her grin of excitement, even as she fell.

She slowed her fall and gently drifted to the bottom.

Her feet touched hard s now , and as she craned her neck to look, she saw that she had fallen from a great height.  This was a towering _interior,_ of a cathedral-like, geometrically designed m onolith with five walls and, high above, a missing ceiling. A pentagonal, blank white Antarctic sky glowed far overhead. This was clearly some kind of c entral hall , s he thought as she observed hallways branching off on every one of those five sides; judging from the debris littering the frozen ground, and the fact that r ows of doorways went all the way up the structure, many  stories ’ worth of floor must have fallen through  over hundreds of centuries .  _Unless the inhabitants were_ _spiritually_ _advanced enough to defy gravity with a mere thought! Or they had some kind of contraption for lifting its residents to where they wanted to go!_ Looking up,  i t was hard to tell which of those floors she had actually dropped from. It had been several stories up.  _I’m not sure I want to be shouting in essentially a giant echo chamber in enemy territory,_ Helena thought.  _I’ll wait for them to come to me. Those kids will figure it out._

When her fellow travelers did finally come to the brink of the drop, and looked down as human nature was bound to dictate, Helena waved up at them with enthusiasm, and then of course Astolfo yodeled down at her, as she should have expected.

“Granny Helena! Are you okay? Do you want us to come get you?!” His high-pitched voice bounced around the vast tower as if it was making sure to spread itself down every single cavernous hall.

Helena hoped her pointed look was clear even from this far away.

“We needed to go as far down as we could anyway,” Abby said, even her soft voice reaching with crystal clarity.

_In the name of every Adept of the Great White Brotherhood, can just one of you read the room?!_

At least the Baron seemed to have the presence of mind to whisper. Helena watched the meandering of her very small and far away comrades for a while before instead taking it upon herself to inspect the decorative arabesques a nd odd sculptures between the doorways on her level.  They seemed to depict conventionalized five-branched trees, with five roots mirroring the branches below. What did ‘five’ mean to them?

While she was pondering those mystic statues—and drawing certain altogether thrilling, if absurd, conjectures about their nature—the other Servants were beginning a precarious descent. Helena looked up just long enough to see Astolfo swinging through empty space and decided she had seen enough. If a Heroic Spirit could go prematurely grey, she was a t risk of  achiev ing it more quickly than Lord El-Melloi II. 

Finally, three sets of etheric feet made contact with the d ark slate. Helena put away the notebook she had materialized.

“Welcome to the ground.”

“We’re lucky to be here,” Gilles said. He and Abby both looked even paler than usual.

“ What do you think those are?” Helena said, gesturing at the statues.

“Some form of decorative element,” Gilles said, at the same time that Astolfo suggested,  with his usual alien logic, “Famous people?” Abby stayed curiously silent. 

Helena tapped her chin. “Hm. Thank you  for your contribution , Astolfo.”

They stood there in the open hallway for a moment, contemplating each of the five dark passages. The going would be easier from now on,  as each of the doorways was easily ten feet tall and six feet wide. But Helena understood their trepidation about walking further into what they understood as the domain of an unknown enemy.

Astolfo sniffed around, light brows furrowed in concentration. “Boy though, the vibes here are intense! But I think Master’s smell is coming from that way the strongest.  Plus, that’s got the nastiest vibes, so I’m feeling big baddie energy that way! It’s like even the air is slimy!”

“Well.” Helena put her hands on her hips. “I don’t like the sound of that, but that’s where we’re going!”

Abby’s face brightened. “You’re so brave!”

Helena laughed. “I might just be too excited to be exploring to get properly scared. To me this is like getting to explore Atlantis or Lemuria in the flesh!”

Abby didn’t seem to know what either of those places were, which Helena noted to herself to rectify later. But the cheer reached her regardless. “I really want Uncle Carter to meet you now, Miss Helena! Heroic Spirits must be the greatest and strongest of humanity!”

Astolfo bounced back to the group to ruffle Abby’s hair and pull on her sleeve. “Aww, thanks. Now c’mon, Abby, let’s run ahead of those stuffy adults. Last one into the corridor is a rotten egg!”

“I don’t want to be a rotten egg!”  Abby trotted after him, clutching her stuffed bear to her chest.

Helena watched them go for a minute, then followed. “Come on, Baron. I don’t know how I feel about being called a ‘stuffy adult’!”

“Just imagine how I feel...I’m only twenty-four...”

Their spirits raised, the party descended even further beneath the earth.

–

As it turned out, Astolfo and Abby couldn’t run far ahead without running into a wall of debris (which Astolfo punched away), so the stuffy adults caught up almost immediately. Thankfully, beyond that, the passage seemed completely intact. It had no windows at all, but, as Helena guided light to the ceiling and  walls , she saw crevices and alcoves where electrical devices might have once been fitted.

_I wonder if they used AC or DC?_

As they walked, Helena drank up the long carved relief that ran along the wall, more than half as tall as she was, which depicted prehistoric flora and fauna in exquisite scientific detail but with a dynamic lifelike quality that even modern human artists still struggled to capture. This half-diagrammatic half-aesthetic  work was the decorative art of a highly i ntellectual  race,  one that treasured accuracy and artistry in equal amounts .  She now fell behind Gilles, who was walking at a steady pace, back upright, as if trying not to look at anything to either side. Astolfo and Abby had paused farther ahead to giggle at something in the mural.

“It’s like a funny-looking beaver,” Abby explained with a girlish snort when Helena finally caught up. She was pointing at a primitive proto-mammal, surely an alarmingly large ancestor of the beavers they knew.

“Look at its lil fangs,” Astolfo said, his own little fang peeking past his lip.

“If you kids come away from the journey of a lifetime and all you remember is ‘a funny-looking beaver,’ I’ll—wait, what am I doing?!”  Helena tossed her bag to the ground and began digging through its contents. “Chalk, chalk!  I’ve got to see if the Olcotts have found a camera to pass to me...after all, if the dimensions are shifting I might never get to go back here!”

“With all due respect,” Gilles said stiffly, but Helena’s mind had already changed tracks before he could continue.

“You’re right, you’re right. Master is more important.” She shouldered her bag with a wistful sigh. “More important than touching across aeons to a race that has long since ascended to the etheric plane...”

“Plus, if we keep going, there’ll be more fun pictures ahead!” Astolfo said. Abby nodded agreement, though guardedly. Helena suspected that was because she alone knew what lurked at the end of the journey. Did she fear what it would think when it saw her at the vanguard?

But there would be no more fun p ictures .

As their party proceeded further down the corridor, the carvings became more and more effaced, and eventually scraped away completely.

“ This doesn’t look like weathering,” Helena said, as much to herself as to them. She brushed her hand across a blank sunken surface and was almost repulsed by how unexpectedly smooth it was. “Eugh.” Actually, now that she was thinking about it, the tighter passage they had been traveling through before this change in scenery had been oddly smooth in tighter places too, like a giant stone intestine. If they had been in any other cave, she would have attributed it to running water, but nothing like that had happened here for millions of years.  The caverns had an increasingly rotten smell too, like what she imagined decomposing mold would smell like.

She had to imagine, as Abby walked slower and slower until she was bringing up the rear, that she knew what it was. After all, Abby had arrived with a similarly foul smell, all organic perversion and shut-off dead places.

“Abby,” she said, quiet enough that Abby could hear her but Astolfo and Gilles couldn’t. “I’m not going to push you to talk about things you don’t want to  ( even if I am REALLY curious )  but if y ou know more than you’re letting on, it’s not fair to trick people.”

“I’ m not tricking anyone... I’m not. ” Abby spoke like Helena had touched a nerve. “But you’re right. I know it’s not fair. And I know Uncle Carter would say this isn’t my fault. But I still feel like it is... a nd I have the power to fix it, so I feel like I should.”

“E ven if that is how you feel—and I can’t imagine why—l et us help you. It just doesn’t make sense for you to do  whatever  it  is  alone when the rest of us are here.”

They walked down the uncommonly smooth and ominously effaced hallway.

“...I know you’re right,” Abby said, balling up her fists in her black dress like she had to brace herself to admit it. “Thank you, Miss Helena.”

Helena smiled with the pride of a mentor. Then she called ahead.

“Astolfo! Are we making good time?”

“ There’s still three days til the full moon~” he singsonged, not seeming to mind how it echoed in the ominous atmosphere. “ I bet we could even go back to look at the beavers again!”

“ You say ‘making good time’, but we don’t even know where we’re going or how far it is,” Gilles pointed out. “Are we just to wander in the dark endlessly until we find whatever enemy we seek?  And  _then_ what? ”

Abby’s blue eyes were still and distant. “I know we’ll get to her in time. We shouldn’t worry about that.”

Helena felt that she was sensing something that echoed on some imperceptible dimension. Some sense gifted to her that not even she, mistress of the secret ancient knowledge, could conceive of. She asked, but knew her voice was quiet enough to only reach her own ears. “So then. What _should_ we worry about, Abby?”


	9. Interlude: Womb Level

_Master/Fujimaru Ritsuka_

She was aware of not being aware.

As Fujimaru Ritsuka came to, nothing in her surroundings was unveiled to her. It was as if she had opened her eyes to find herself blindfolded. She heard nothing but a distant white pulsing roar. The air, though she felt herself breathing it, had no taste, smell or temperature. As she kept breathing, focusing on it because there was nothing else at all to ground herself in, she realized the white roar was the sound of her lungs.

So she could hear herself. But outside herself, there was nothing to touch. As Ritsuka reached out, trying for her fingertips to brush against anything in the all-consuming blackness, she realized she couldn’t even tell where her limbs were. By trying to reach her fingers out, she realized she had none. And from there, she realized she had no hands at all. No arms, no shoulders. The dread crept all the way up her body. She wasn’t even sure she had a head.

_No_ , she told herself, stemming the panic before it started. Though it was numb, her physical form must exist. She could hear her heart pumping. She had been breathing since the start. _I’ve just been locked in my own body by some kind of magecraft._

_‘Just’ been locked in my own body...what the hell. I guess you can get used to anything._

_How did I get here?_

She had gone to bed after a long evening talking with Mash about everything and nothing. Raikou and Serenity and Kiyohime had tucked her in, like they usually did, but she was so used to them she had fallen asleep easily.

And that was where her memory ended. _I must have been kidnapped in my sleep._ _Was it_ _the Mages’ Association? I thought we had a little more time than that. I wanted to thank and say goodbye to everyone...and spend more time with Mash...I didn’t want to say goodbye to Mash…_

Then Ritsuka caught a sound hidden in the deafening waves of her own breathing. A hard, confident approaching tapping, boots on stone.

Then a voice, so close to her ear she would have jumped if she had had a body.

“Senpai?”

“Mash?”

The voice giggled. “Do I seriously sound like Mash? Come on, Senpai. You don’t have that many Servants, do you?” A pause, as if the owner of the voice might have frowned. “Or maybe you do. I’m the only one you really need, right, Se-n-pa-i?”

“BB?!”

“Aww, you’re right! I knew it, I’d never let you forget me!”

“What did you do?”

“What do you mean, what did I do?” BB’s voice sounded affronted, but only in a playful way. “Senpai, come on~ Not everything is my fault~ Oh, but I guess _this_ thing is!”

“Where are we?”

“You don’t wanna know, Senpai.”

“Don’t mess around, BB.”

“Aw, so cold...you know I only do things that turn out good for you, Senpai! I just hacked your brain a little and turned some things off. For your protection. You really don’t want to have use of your senses right now.”

Ritsuka was sure, even without being able to tell, that the hairs on the back of her neck were standing up. “Why? What did you do?”

“You’ll find out in a little while, I promise~ My dear little goats are just really bad at timing, so you turned up unfashionably early, and I just had to put you on ice for a minute. But Senpai, I’m always right here in your head, you know? And when I’m your one-and-only Servant, our link is going to be even stronger, and then we can kiss and hold hands and do whateeeever you want, and I’ll even let you use all your senses at once if you ask nicely. But that’s only if I think you can handle it. You _are_ just a fragile human, after all.”

There was something unpleasantly cold in the way BB spoke this time, beneath her sugary-sweet tones. Colder than ice, as sterile as the pitch-black depths of space. It made Ritsuka want to run, and she wanted to run even more when she remembered there was nowhere to run to. This thing was already in her head.

She felt that if she kept the thought to herself it would escape her, or that this BB would be able to hear it rattling around unvoiced. Best to ask it on her own terms.

“You’re not BB, are you?”

The unseeable BB, just behind her ear, must have smiled.

“I am in BB’s Saint Graph.”

“So you’re not her.”

“She’s me. We’re interchangeable, Senpai—she fulfills my role in this story, see?”

_Heroic Spirit lore is too much for me even two years in._ “I don’t see.”

“Senpai. BB is just one of the roles I can play. I wear many, many masks, y’know.” Not-BB’s voice was so close, Ritsuka could, impossibly, hear her lips part. Even though they were incorporeal. “But I’m just an observer through the eye-holes. Just a mad dream, just a thought. Don’t you want me to be realer than that?” Ritsuka could hear the breaths from those lips falling hot and heavy on her ear in the dark, though she couldn’t feel them, she didn’t even have an ear, and it was driving her mad. She wanted to crawl out of her skin. She didn’t have any skin to crawl out of. “If you don’t like this one, I’ll find another one. I’ll wear every mask I can fit into until you can contract with the real me, and then I can be anything you want. And we can do anything we want. I just need you to contract with me, Senpai. For the sake of that eternal mad and dark paradise...”

Ritsuka pursed her thought-lips in frustration and was about to spit out, _I’d be much more willing to contract with you if I knew who you were_ —but then lightning flashed in the darkness. And though nothing was illuminated, she thought for a second, _the Count,_ and then she didn’t think about anything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> super short update to prove I'm not dead. Gudako truly lives in a lily paradise lol


	10. The Mouth of the Abyss, Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a long time without an update, and I apologize for that...buuuuut I have some very good news, which is that I sat my ass down and decided this was something I really wanted to finish, and so I made it my project for Nanowrimo! I've been getting a whole lot done this month, and to revitalize it, I'm publishing this chapter a little early! From this point forward updates will be weekly now that I have a hell of a cushion
> 
> Speaking of hell, you'll notice I've changed the rating from T to M. This is because I realized I wanted to explore Gilles and Abby's pasts and their current mental states at a depth that the T rating didn't feel appropriate for. I will be tagging for potential triggers and general ick-factor moments as they appear, but please proceed with caution if you don't want to read about characters sliding ass-backwards into murderous urges and self-destructive behavior.  
> Also, there will be no minor-directed attraction in this fic. None at all. I'm shooing that elephant out of the room right now, there will only be 100% wholesome child murder flashbacks I don't CARE what his wikipedia page says Fate canon isn't real life and I can whitewash the character I max grailed/bonded/fou'd all I want

_Foreigner/Abigail Williams_

Abby was afraid of what laid ahead.

Miss Helena had picked up on it, and that fact scared her too.

Because it was scary enough to step into this situation, to enter a place under the Enemy’s dominion while serving as an extension of her Father. She was just a girl, but since she was acting under her Father’s authority, she had His strength and protection to fall back on. He was her shepherd and her armor. Even the snares of the Enemy would not touch her—

But since she was merely a child, of course she was still afraid. She hoped that wasn’t a sin. She was already so burdened with sins. Even though she had been saved, the weight of them still made her walk with faltering steps.

Having these friends of Miss Ritsuka with her helped to temper and distract from the fear. But to balance it out, now she had to worry about them too. Not that she worried about their safety; she did a little, of course, but Miss Ritsuka’s Servants had shown before that they could weather this kind of evil. They were wonderfully righteous, shining beings, proof of God’s love. Even now, as she walked at their side through the dark and smooth tunnels that led to the realm of the Enemy, that radiance seemed to touch her.

She was afraid of the radiance of those eyes being turned upon her.

Abby knew she was a wretched thing. It had been made clear to her in Salem. It had been made clear to her again and again, neverending, until she had burst like a flower. The Lord had taken mercy on her, but not before she had known her sin and done her penance, and she understood completely that the world He had brought her into was not compatible with the radiant world of the Servants and Miss Ritsuka. She was an outsider to them. Her traveling companions didn’t fully understand that now, but the further they traveled, the more they would realize. The world of the Enemy and Abby’s world were one and the same.

Miss Helena would be repulsed, as she had been repulsed by the spells of the Things that had sapped the generator back in Chaldea.

The Baron would think she was a witch.

Astolfo—well, Astolfo seemed to have his own way of thinking of the world. Abby wasn’t sure how he perceived anything.

Abby hugged Hugo close to her chest as they walked. Every step felt like walking back to the parish house, knowing her uncle would be waiting there to scold her.

She knew it was childish. She knew it was as foolish to keep what she knew to herself as it was to open up to one of her companions.

Miss Helena’s words, though they had faded into the cold underground air so long ago, were still hanging around her. And hadn’t she had hundreds of years, at the least, to grow up? Couldn’t she act like an adult and own up to everything, just once?

Abby was a foolish girl to the last.

_Saber/Gilles de Rais_

Astolfo had run ahead just a moment ago, after sniffing the air like a dog that had scented game. Now, Gilles understood why. Unless his ears had deceived him, he had just heard a _sound_ , a sound none of their party had made. Even now, Madame Blavatsky paused and furrowed her brow, and he knew she was also listening. Only Abby seemed unsurprised. But he couldn’t imagine why.

It was a bird.

Not any kind of bird that was familiar to him, but he couldn’t think of anything else it would be. Just an everyday, homely birdcall—a squawk.

“What the hell?” Madame Blavatsky said, and he felt the same way. “Let’s check it out. Maybe it’s some kind of unknown wildlife? Some kind of special penguin?” She took off down the tunnel and Gilles faintly heard her talking to herself—“They could call it a Blavatsky’s Penguin! Or a Blavatsky-Olcott Penguin! Or just an Olcott Penguin...”

“We’re getting too confident down here, aren’t we?” Gilles muttered back to Abby. “Running off at the drop of a hat—w-wait!”

Abby had taken off after Blavatsky, and Gilles had to walk as quickly as he could to avoid getting left by himself in the dark that flashlights barely remedied.

They stumbled along after the echoing sound, chasing after the soft tap of Blavatsky’s footsteps as they kept pace with her ahead. Gilles was thankful again for Abby’s light blonde hair, something to focus on that stood out from the dark. Still, if he kept his gaze on it, his vision started to throb with the imprints of old impossible memories—and then he was tripping too, as the smooth floor once again grew rocky and uneven. He saw a flash of old animal bone. More of them threatened the edge of his vision, and he resolved to focus only on Abby’s hair. Looking at piles of bones would trigger a memory far worse.

The squawking sound was louder now, enough to hurt his ears. And then, as he saw Miss Blavatsky’s slim form illuminated against her lights, he heard her laughter, just as loud and as striking as the sound of birds, echoing carelessly through what sounded like a wide grotto.

“It’s a penguin nest! It really is a penguin nest!”

Gilles caught up to her, pausing on the ridge beside her, and finding that with the help of her lights he could look down into a vast and filthy pit.

If he had found it first he wouldn’t have laughed at it. Encrusted white bird excrement, centuries if not thousands of years old, ran down steep cliffsides that must have been carved out by water action long undreamed-of eons ago, and he still couldn’t see the full chamber despite the efforts of Blavatsky’s small whirling lights. And then there was the incessant screeching. To Gilles’s ears, it sounded like an echoing shaft from the depths of hell.

He was almost grateful for the eyelessness of the birds. To look down into this trench to see countless eyes looking back up at him would have been too much. They were packed deep at the bottom of the pit and flopped and mewled all along the ridged edges. Gilles had never seen a penguin in his life, but he knew what one looked like, and these white, huge, soft-bodied lumpy birds were far from the ideal he had expected.

“They can tell we’re here,” Blavatsky mused. The mass of penguins strained up to her quiet voice with upturned beaks, as if the whole vast cavern was a giant nest of fledglings awaiting a mother bird.

“Let’s give them snacks!” Astolfo yipped. He was leaning over the pit at a precarious angle, digging into his pack and not caring as empty candy wrappers fluttered down into blind and hungry mouths.

“Don’t, they might choke,” Abby pleaded, tugging on his skirt to pull him back.

Gilles couldn’t tear his eyes away from the roiling mass of white birds; the more he looked the more he saw their misery, the filth caked in their downy feathers, the way no matter how they fought and overlapped, they could never climb the steep sides. It was as if the cavern was an oubliette they were imprisoned in. He glanced up, as if expecting a vast grate or hinged door overhead. But all he saw was the hint of vast stalactites reaching down out of the blackness.

“So,” Blavatsky said, trying to get Astolfo’s attention as he play-wrestled with Abby, “this is the way to go? Are you sure? Can we backtrack?”

“Eh?” Astolfo clambered up from all fours and dusted himself off. For just a moment he had the decency to look like the Paladin of Charlemagne that he was. “Yep! This is the way with the strongest scent~” He put on a slightly deeper voice for effect. “I compared one thousand four hundred different routes through the mountains and this is the only one that leads to our Master.”

Blavatsky blinked. “Oh. Really?”

“Nah~ Just kidding!”

_What a person to be stuck in a cave with,_ Gilles thought. Or thought he thought. Though he had heard the voice in his own mind, the tone had sounded uncomfortably like Prelati’s.

Blavatsky and Astolfo kept talking while he worried over it, backing away from the penguin nest as if that had been the source of his delusion and not his own wretched mind. There was a sizable lip around the edge of it, and he was able to find a rock to sit upon that was far back enough that he could barely see a single repulsive form. He fumbled in the pocket of the fur-lined coat that Astolfo had insisted they all wear and found the cold beads of his rosary. He might as well cast himself again into prayer. As if it would cleanse him.

_I’m losing my grip so fast._

His sanity was slipping though his fingers like minuscule grains of sand, so quickly now, though the beginning had been so insidious. _It couldn’t have been this easy all along. I couldn’t have been this close._

From the beginning, when he had first been summoned in Chaldea, he had known that this Saber form was ephemeral as foam, just a lie. But he had still clung to it. This prized form was the proof that he _did_ deserve to be remembered for his glory days, that he had earned his rank of Marshal of France. But it was peeling away like old paint. And beneath it—he didn’t want to think. It was too close to the surface.

“Okay,” Blavatsky said, breaking his brief nightmare reverie. “So Astolfo and I are going to explore this big cavern some more. We’ve been looking as best we can from up here, but I think we need to climb down into it. This ledge thing doesn’t go all the way around the edge.”

“Be careful,” Abby said. She had been lurking on the edge of Gilles’s vision all along—like him, she seemed uncomfortable with the sight of the pathetic trapped penguins.

“Abby, do you want to come with us?” Blavatsky said.

Abby shook her head. “I’m fine staying up here. I really don’t like seeing things like this...um...I mean, I know it’s important, but I think it’s cruel. It makes me sad.”

“...Alright. We’ll be back in a bit. If we’re in trouble, we’ll send a magic flare up, and if we’re _really_ really in trouble—“

“Then the Hippogriff always has my back!” Astolfo curled his gauntlet into a loose thumbs-up.

_Notice they didn’t ask if_ you _wanted to come,_ Prelati said. _A_ _lthough, I bet that Blavatsky wants to avoid you herself as much as she wants to keep you away from little girls_ _._

“Be quiet,” Gilles muttered, and resolved to focus on prayer. The din of the penguins grew louder as Blavatsky and Astolfo began to descend, but he didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to watch his companions clamber down into that pit.

But as he began his rosary, he couldn’t ignore that Abby was lingering by his side and listening as he prayed.

Let her listen. She was a Christian girl from another land and age. She was studious and pious and of course she wanted to learn new ways of prayer.

_She could teach you new ways of prayer too._ Prelati was at his back. _She can pray in tongues you’ve never even heard spoken by human mouths. When I tried transcribing prayers like that, I had to cast myself into such deep gulfs of madness and folly it’s a wonder I remembered how to speak French._

Gilles remembered that. He shouldn’t remember, because it hadn’t happened to him yet. But he remembered how Prelati had written out the blasphemous text of that skin-bound book in a language neither of them had ever seen, and how much children’s blood he had needed to do it.

_We used as much of those dear children as we could. But you and I both know you were a wastrel to your core. I had to help Poitou and Griart dispose of so many mangled and half-plundered corpses, and it wasn’t even my job . You used to just leave them there, with so much meat still on the bone, and demand another even though the last hadn’t even been used up—but that’s what I loved about you, Gilles. You were a consummate nobleman. You were the pinnacle of material madness. It was truly inspirational._

How could he recite his prayer with Prelati watching him like this, with Abby hovering tauntingly on the threshhold of his consciousness? He sucked in a deep breath and put the beads away, resolving to speak to her and ask for some peace if she could give him any.

His heart melted the instant he looked up at her. Even with his identity disintegrating around him, he couldn’t help but give a reassuring smile to such a charming child.

“Did you want to pray the rosary again?”

She shook her head, and sat by him without a word. Even in the strange greenish light of the dim cave, her hair shone a beautiful blonde.

Prelati would not be silent. _You always wanted us to find blonde victims. Was it because of Jeanne?_

“I wanted to talk to you, Baron. Um. While Miss Helena and Astolfo are gone, if that’s alright with you.”

_Why_ , Gilles pleaded internally. But to Abby, he could only nod, and smile placidly, and encourage her to go on, playacting that he was the good knight who had served at Jeanne’s side and that he wasn’t hallucinating and breaking out in a cold sweat beneath his coat.

Abby didn’t speak at first, but instead looked out over the noisy abyss.

“Um. Do you know what this reminds me of?” She paused as if waiting for him to speak, and then went on when he did not. “It’s like a big huge pen of pigs. Wild pigs are much different from farm pigs. They’re hairier and darker. And wild pigs have lots of room to run around in the wild, but a pen of pigs is all shut in together...you know?”

“Yes…yes, you’re exactly right,” Gilles said. “I hadn’t realized that, but it is very like a pig pen...But pig pens are set up by humans. These penguins live here by themselves.”

He already knew, as he said it, that he had just put words to what had been bothering him.

And he knew by the way she hesitated before speaking that his fear had been correct.

“These penguins didn’t get here by themselves, Baron.”

He wanted to say, wanted to beg her, _but surely no one lives here,_ but it was pointless to deny it, though no human could live in this cold. Instead he grasped at something else.

“Who would feed them, then? This city looks abandoned.”

“This city _is_ abandoned. My uncle said that when it got too cold, they started to go underground, because the middle of the earth is warm.”

“But who are they?”

This girl, this brave, sweet, and charming girl, was the key to doors of knowledge Gilles did not want opened. And here he was knocking on those doors so she could unlock them. Did he really want to talk to her that much? Couldn’t he be silent, and not indulge her? It was like he was drinking a poisoned cup, knowing it had been handed to him by the Devil.

“I don’t know what they called themselves. I could ask my Father, but I probably couldn’t pronounce it, because I don’t know how to whistle...” She ducked her head in embarrassment. And she kept her gaze pointed downward, her eyes focused on her shiny shoes as she tapped her feet together. “Baron, in your time and country, they believed in the Devil, right?”

“Yes. Very much so. Why?”

“What did they say the Devil was like?”

“I...I suppose it would depend on who you asked. The Devil could take many forms, to tempt us or torment us.”

“And where did they say the Devil could be found?”

Gilles furrowed his brows. “Hell, I suppose? Or among us, inciting us to evil?” As he paused, the flapping and squawking sounds of the damned penguins filled the silence. “Why do you ask?”

“Because...I know you’re a Christian, and I wanted to tell you—well, Miss Helena has her own Eastern faith, and I think Astolfo is God-fearing in his own way, but um, I wanted to tell you, Baron, because I think you understand. I almost think you already know.” She took a deep breath. “We are going to Hell, Baron. We might even be there already.”

“What?”

She was emboldened by his puzzlement, and began speaking, as if a weight had been lifted from her chest.

“I came here to fight devils in their home. I figured, what else do you call that? By devils, I mean, um...they are not fallen angels, but they are inhuman, and they worship the Enemy, and he does his works through them. You saw their charms and totems in Chaldea’s basement, right? They evoke the Enemy and the great goat-footed Mother of Witches, so even though devils isn’t the best word for them I figured it would be better than explaining what they are, especially since I don’t know what they’re called.” She ducked her head as if waiting for the weight of a blow. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m a very bad girl, Baron. I lie because it’s easy. And I know that. But it makes me feel good to make other people happy, even if it is by lying and obscuring the truth.” The words tumbled from her mouth.

The way Abby spoke those last words was both tormented and oddly rote, like she was reciting a speech someone had threatened her into performing; like she knew the words by heart, but was afraid to actually say them.

Gilles could only stare at her, dumbstruck as she continued her performance.

“I know I mentioned some goat-people back when we were in Chaldea. But that’s not what I’m the most afraid of. I’ve met them before when I was with my uncle, and they aren’t very trustworthy, but they’re not the ones who live down here and they’re not the ones we’re following. There are other beings down here,” she swallowed, her eyes red with unshed tears, and Gilles barely understood or made out what it was that she forced herself to say next. “The shapeshifting slimy shuggy things. I’m scared to see them in person all by myself. My uncle said they survived in Antarctica in a subterranean city because they escaped from the Old Ones—those were the people who lived here a long time ago, but they weren’t people like you and me. They came from the stars, and they knew how to make life. But one of the things they made got too smart, and imitated them, and prayed to the Devil in their language. He made them stronger and they dethroned their masters and now He rules over them down here—it’s the Cult of the Crawling Ones.” The strange lore fell from her lips with something between repulsion and fevered reverence.

Her words had a weight and a truth that terrified him. Though she was asking him for consolation, she seemed to be describing his own half-realized fears. It all sounded like one of the fever dreams he would have in his latter days, when all had been a whirlwind of defiled limbs and Prelati’s teachings and summoning demons and the accursed skin-bound book. Yes, this was how Prelati had spoken in the very last days, when that book had been written, the book that even now was grafted to his Saint Graph like a tumor on his soul. Prelati had been so pale and yet so flushed when he emerged from his trances, speaking of things like “the mad Arab”, “the Elder Pharos”, “the Sunken City”, “the Sleeping Demon Gods”. He had looked like a mad demon god himself. They both had.

Gilles tried not to think of that grotesque Abby he had seen at their first meeting. The Abby no one else had spoken of. That grotesque and surreal and repulsive girl-thing that had burst into their world with gnarled and blackened hands. Hadn’t he himself grown gnarled and looming in his twilight days, before he had been mercifully smitten down by his plutomaniacal peers? How much worse could it have gotten? What sights had Abigail Williams seen, and what had she become because of them?

They had all followed this girl into the depths. This little blonde girl who spoke with such authority and rallied them when they were unsure, and led them forth into the pits of nightmare. She had convinced them the rest of Chaldea was gone, and she was their only recourse; that a new world had opened up beneath them, and their Master had been taken there. How ludicrous, he thought. How _convenient._ A fresh anxiety rose up in him when he thought the word. She was just the kind of child he would be most endeared to, and she had led him into a hell that was perfectly tuned to aggravate his own madness. Everything was so eerily resonant, so oddly familiar—was it even real? Were Madame Blavatsky and Astolfo caught in it too, or were they players that had been fabricated to serve the necessary parts, to make his nightmare frighten him all the worse? And when had the break in reality been? Gilles tried to search back for the seam.

In front of him, Abby was staring into his face. Her eyes were still red, but their gaze was unwavering, as if eager to drink up his reaction. She wanted him to tell her that he would follow her unquestioningly into that fearful blackness.

“The Devil,” he muttered. “And his goatish minions. Protoplasmic ever-shifting Satan-worshipers, bred by cosmic travelers in the depths of the pit. So many fascinating players you’ve described. What are you, then, Abby?”

Her breath caught in her throat, and she backed away just a step, shiny shoes crunching on the bone-strewn floor.

“You talk like one who has read the Devil’s book. What are you? You can’t be a Heroic Spirit, yet you’re clearly much more than a human girl. What kind of creature or succubus are you? Am I under your spell?” He laughed and it sounded like a sob. “The ‘uncle’ and ‘father’ you speak of must be learned devils you summoned up to impart their knowledge. Maybe you invented them completely, and you are the director of this play. Or are you here on behalf of Beelzebub—or Prelati?”

Abby stayed silent, like a scolded child. Then, finally—“I am a witch, Baron.”

He nodded in understanding. They had called Jeanne a witch. He had stung at the affront, in the early days. Then, as the years had passed by, he had thought differently of it. He had daydreamed of a Jeanne who _was_ a witch, who had escaped and would visit him again someday as a hare or a cat, as a witch who would take her revenge and burn all of France for what they had done. “You must be a powerful witch. You said the Lord’s Prayer with me and felt no pain.”

“Yes.” Why did she whisper it with an almost fevered intensity?

“How long ago was it, that this mad morass started? Does time have no meaning here? Or is this quest for Master a farce?” He shook his head. “Your cover story is as well-thought-out as a child’s. Is that so I would find it charming?”

“You really don’t believe me, Baron?”

“I believe you. I just...” Gilles buried his head in his hands. “Are you going to torment me more right away, or let me stew in this for a bit?”

“...I’m sorry.” Her voice sounded close to tears, and the worst part was, it made Gilles want to comfort her.

But he did not know what his hands would do, so close to her neck.

Far at the bottom of the pit, the penguins raucously cawed and squawked, like the denizens of a mirthful and mocking Hell.


	11. The Mouth of the Abyss, Part 2

_Foreigner/Abigail Williams_

The Baron de Rais’s words, spat with such wounded fury, burned in Abby’s core and made her feel warm. It felt like burning Betty and Uncle’s things in the fireplace—the destruction of something precious for a momentary spark of brightness.

As she ran from him, scurried into a dark cave corner to hide from his betrayed expression, she finally let herself smile.

It was a bad, wicked thing she had done. She had told the one who would be frightened the most. And she had done it for a self-serving reason.

She had wanted to see his expression. She had wanted to be condemned by the gaze of a God-fearing man.

She really, really was a witch. Abby curled up against the rock wall and grinned and grinned into the icy crags, rocking back and forth. The good feeling would pass before long, and she would be left feeling awful and guilty; but she knew that already. She was too familiar with this. She had done it in Salem what must have been hundreds of times. She would act up, receive the punishment, feel worse, and act up again for the momentary thrill of it to make herself feel better. And then the punishment she deserved would come again all on its own. It was a self-perpetuating system.

Still, after the first warm light of his horrified expression, she was already starting to feel bad about it. The Baron was a good man. A kind and upstanding and Christian man, and she had frightened him so badly.

_When he’s had a moment, I wonder if he’ll come to check on me._

It would take a few more instances of mischievous behavior before a kind man would give up on her. Her first uncle, Samuel Parris, had been more short-tempered, but he was a minister, so he had tried to be patient with her. Her second uncle, the false Carter, had been so unkind she hadn’t found any joy in acting up and had only tried to escape and play in the woods. The real Uncle Carter was her favorite. She thought Gilles would be the most like him. He was infinitely patient, an admirably scholarly gentleman who treated her like a little lady instead of a little girl, always waiting for her to apologize instead of beating one out of her.

Even if she asked her all-knowing Father, Abby didn’t think she could understand why she tried to disappoint kind adults the hardest.

While she pondered this, the squawks of the corralled penguins echoed up from the pen, louder and louder, so that she couldn’t ignore them anymore. Was someone—some _thing_ —from the abyssal city coming to eat them? Abby didn’t want to watch that, but couldn’t stand to not know, and so she crept as close to the edge of the pit as she dared to peek.

What she saw was Astolfo pushing his way through the mass of birds, his pink hair standing out against their dingy whiteness. She smiled as much at the ridiculousness of it as she did at the relief that it was only him.

He waved when he caught a glimpse of her, bouncing up and down to be seen over the tops of their heads. Abby waved back.

“Where’s Miss Helena?” she called, as soon as she realized that she was missing.

“She’s fine! Don’t worry! We just found the way through!” Astolfo was buried under a wave of alarmed eyeless penguins who must have been upset by his shrill shouting. He popped back up covered in down. “Hold on one minute~ Ayup~”

In just a few quick bounds Astolfo leapt up out of the pit, first landing lightly on the head of a penguin, then briefly touching on a minuscule ledge, and finally coming to a stop in front of Abby’s amazed eyes, wavering on the edge as if he were about to fall back in.

“Okay! Shoulder your packs and let’s go! You and Nice Gilles are just gonna follow me along this rope—“ Astolfo looked down at his hands as if he expected something to be in them. “Oh no! My rope!”  
Abby giggled. She had no way of confirming her guess. But she thought that Astolfo had lost the rope on purpose, because he sensed that the atmosphere was tense up here.

Or maybe not.

“I must have lost it in the penguins...oh man, well, we’ll find it! For now, though! Abby, jump into my arms! Nice Gilles, put your hands on my waist! We’re gonna wade through these birds til we get the rope back!” Astolfo opened his arms expectantly. Abby hesitated. He was hardly any taller than she was. “Whaaaat, don’t you trust me? I mean, I guess we could just all hold hands...”

Abby found the end of her long sleeve enthusiastically crushed in Astolfo’s glove before she could protest, and glanced back at Gilles to see if he was following.

He seemed to not have heard them at all, hunched over on his rock deep in prayer or thought with his forehead resting on his tightly clasped hands. Abby felt the sharp and hot pang of guilt again just looking at him.

“Oh man, he’s really feelin’ it right now. He gets like that sometimes! Don’t worry, Abby, it’s not your fault! I’ll go poke him~” Astolfo let go of her hand and skipped over to quite literally poke Gilles, and that roused him out of the turmoil that Abby had plunged him into just enough for him to follow.

 _I do wonder how long before he feels better. Or if he will feel better._ Abby worried for just a second that he had been affected worse than she’d wanted.

Astolfo dragged the Baron back with him, and reached out and took Abby’s hand again. Time had no meaning down here in the dark beneath the ever-shifting planes of Leng, but Abby still felt like she had grown so close to her companions that holding hands with Astolfo felt like something that was quite natural and proper, like holding hands with a sister or friend. She hoped it was okay to think of him as a sister—his mind was quite odd, but she could tell he was kind and it would probably flatter him if he knew she felt that way. Miss Helena was like a sister too, a clever older sister of a kind Abby wished she had had. She had been friends with some older girls back in Salem. But that friendship had gotten twisted and strange, and then the false Uncle Carter had appeared and twisted it even further and she had relived it so many times she could barely remember the first time anymore.

It was easy to put the blame on other people, even if she knew deep down she had started the whole thing herself.

Their descent into the penguin-filled pit was as precarious, if not more so, than the last time they had climbed downwards, in the vast five-sided hall. That time they had had a rope to cling onto. This time they had to be more careful, searching for hand- and foot-holds, crawling down one backwards step at a time. None of them could really be hurt by a fall—the others were Servants, and Abby had been transmuted into a semi-spiritual form by her Father long ago, to better protect her from the rigors of interdimensional travel—but she was still afraid of it. Especially when Astolfo chirped that “the big ol’ birds will break your fall if you slip, y’know!”

The penguins were bigger on the ground. Abby was tall for a girl her age, but these penguins were as tall as the Baron, and huge, weighing hundreds of pounds each and pressing in on every side. She reached out for Astolfo and grabbed the end of his plait just to have something to cling to. This felt more like being among cows than pigs. The penguins had the placidity of livestock, and didn’t seem to mind being shoved aside, no matter how much they squawked, but it was slow going, and the smell was terrible. Midway through the slog Astolfo found the rope end he had dropped and that made it easier. The three of them followed it until they came to a smooth-rimmed and organic-looking hole in the far wall of the pit. Astolfo clambered up into it, and Abby followed. It wasn’t as slimy as it looked. In fact it was cold and dry, like all the uncannily smooth walls the fearsome inhabitants of these caves had carved out with their slithering bodies.

And just a little ways down the tunnel was the welcome sight of Miss Helena, holding a flashlight and surrounded by her ghostly satellites.

“Welcome back,” she said. And she smiled, barely able to contain her excitement. “It’s on to more uncharted territory. What lies ahead? It’s our job to find out!”

Abby thought she imagined the way Miss Helena’s eyes flickered to her face. _It’s our job to find out, since you won’t tell u_ _s,_ she seemed to say.

But Miss Helena was a kind woman. Kinder than Abby deserved. So she would not press her any further.

Abby couldn’t make up her mind whether or not to be thankful about that. The Baron had not said anything at all since they continued their travel and was ignoring her completely. After how awfully she must have scared him, that was what she deserved, really.

They pressed ahead. And as they walked, Abby felt a shiver run up from her feet to the top of her head, because a boundary had been crossed. Their little group had stepped over an invisible tripwire, entered the consecrated ground of mages that worked in traditions no human mage could ever conceivably have heard of. She glanced cautiously up at Miss Helena, but she didn’t seem to have noticed it. Of course not—how could she have?

But Abby felt a keen headache coming on, and felt magic surging into her as if she were an empty vessel. This was the kind of magic she was most attuned to, and the native energies sensed it. She shivered, even though the energy felt hot, and fastened the huge fur coat Astolfo had given her at the journey’s start. Her spiritual dress was unraveling under it, the fabric warping away from itself as it tried to wick magical energy away from her by transforming. Her eyes grew hot as if she were about to cry, but she knew they were just changing to red.

She wished the Baron would recover from the fright she’d given him and yell at her. Instead, she just dug her nails into her wrist within her coat, and bit the inside of her cheek enough to hurt.

 _They’re going to find out soon. They’re going to find out where I’ve been leading them like sheep to the slaughter and they’re going to be so mad. They’ll turn on me, like everyone always does. They’ll think I’m wicked._ And, Abby reminded herself, they would be right.

But Miss Ritsuka still needed them, and Abby didn’t know what else to do. So she trailed behind the wonderful new friends and companions she didn’t deserve. And they entered irrevocably into the realm of creatures Abby could not bear to speak the names of while there was a hint of humanity in her, not even to frighten a friend. Towards the ancient and degenerate city of the horrid Shoggoths, they who had conquered their elder masters. There in the dark even now they flopped and writhed at twisted altars, in obeisance to their lord, the dark and cunning Enemy that she had been brought up to fear: the horned god of the pagans, the seducer of witches, the Lord of the Pit that her Father called _Nyarlathotep._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the short chapters, the next one will be twice this length!


	12. The Vestibule of Hell

_ Caster/Helena Blavatsky _

Helena was starting to develop certain theories about the biologies of these tunnels’  inhabitants .  H er mind was open to outrageous theories by nature, and lately it had been forced further open still by the shifting of the dimensions over the Plateau of Leng.

_ Fundamentally, they’re slime creatures, aren’t they? _

_ Slimy, viscous, maybe even corrosive beings with variable shapes, right? Right?  _ _ It only makes sense. The Root Races  _ _ before humanity _ _ were more spiritual than physical, and only gained form as they lost their spiritual attributes and moved into the material world! Of course th _ _ is previous race would _ _ b _ _ e semi-solid _ _ and b _ _ e composed of materials unknown to us _ _! And the SPR called me crazy. I’m sure they’re the ones who would feel crazy if they saw where I was now! _

The Mahatmas didn’t respond to vindicate her, but maybe they would next time their little group found a nook to meditate in.  Not that she needed a break. Helena was hardly tired, and even imagined she was getting more energetic as they went because of their closer proximity to Master. She, Astolfo, and Gilles were the only Servants Master even had right now. So it made sense that she was able to feel that closeness, literally. A few more miles, and she might even be able to take over as navigator from Astolfo—not that she didn’t trust his nose. Or his metaphorical nose, more likely. There was no connection in the text of  _ Orlando Furioso _ between Astolfo and beasts, as far as she knew. 

_ Not that I have the time to read that ridiculous book...though I might owe it to him after all this.  _ _ Though the first thing I’m doing when everything is set right is  _ _ brewing myself a spiked mug of tea and  _ _ telling Mr. Holmes  _ _ all  _ _ about what I’ve been through. _

Helena glanced back to see Abby. _ Actually. The  _ first  _ first thing I’m doing is sitting down for a thank-you and a long chat with our new friend. _

Helena was granted, as a Caster-class Servant, knowledge of every branch of magic, from the ancient Egyptian to the newfangled T helemic and Typhonian.  She was a teacher and guide to the depths of her soul, an adept now at a much greater level than she had been in life.  But she still couldn’t pin down quite what energies Abby was giving off. T hose energies were stronger now than  they had been, just like she and Astolfo and Gilles were. But Abby wasn’t a Servant contracted to  their  Master— _ so what is this, Abby _ ?

Something about even the way A bby walked was a little different. She trudged with her eyes on the ground. Helena caught a glimpse of redness and wondered for a second if she had been crying. 

So, rather than forging bravely ahead into the cold and greenish blackness— _ damn my kind and motherly heart! _ —Helena  dropped back to once again try to pry some answers out of Abby.

As soon as Abby looked up at her, though, Helena started. She had seen redness in those eyes. But it wasn’t from tears. The hue of her eyes had changed.

Abby rubbed her face with her floppy oversized sleeve but it was too late. Helena had already seen it.

Not that she had never seen a friend change shape. She’d had to hold back her laughter the first time she’d seen Edison try to get through a door with those new patriotic wings of his. And when she herself had first dropped her matronly shape so that dear old Olcott could see the real her, she’d practically felt his shock herself.

The only thing that actually really unsettled her about what she’d just glimpsed was that Abby had hidden it from her. 

_ What does it signify? _

_ Why doesn’t she want me to know? _

Helena shivered, and it wasn’t from the cold. At least, no matter what their companion really was, they were truly drawing close to Master.  The energy and confidence flowing through her veins was the real deal, even if it was coming just a trickle at a time. 

_ But when we get there, what will we be bringing with us? That’s the thing, isn’t it? _ Helena had a sudden image of a malignant rogue Servant, an entity that longed to be tethered to their Master and have her energies for themselves. It was just a ghost of a premonition, maybe just a paranoid fantasy, but she was willing to chalk it up to the Mahatmas.

_ Even if Abby is something like that, there’s one of her and three of us. At least five of us if we count the Mahatmas. Six, if we counted the Hippogriff. Though why in the name of Shangri-La I’m counting the Hippogriff… _

They’d cross that bridge when they came to it. For now, Helena was determined to soak up every sight she could along the way.

“ There’s gonna be a bigger room up ahead,” Astolfo said with confidence.

“I wonder what the purpose of this passage is.” Helena swept the flashlight back the way they had came, past Abby’s downcast face and over the tall pale Baron. He was lingering even further back than Abby was and it occurred to her for just a moment that she should have insisted harder that Abby come with her and Astolfo,  n o matter what Abby was. But then she felt guilty about it. Gilles was a companion, and right now he looked more frightened than frightening. _ “ _ It’s definitely not for the penguins. They can’t get up into the tunnel with their short little legs. Unless this was put here for someone else to take them out.”

“Of course, it’s because they’re food,”Abby said.

“To think that that’s what devils eat,” Gilles murmured.

“Interesting hypothesis. I’ve got some of my own.” Helena bristled only slightly at the idea that spiritual beings such as the residents of this ancient city would take the lives of other beings so they could eat. Meat-eating, well, it wasn’t a very Mahatma thing to do.

If she wasn’t imagining it, the air was getting warmer, even a little humid, as they traveled.  Sometimes in her travels she had seen underground hot springs, where volcanism warmed the underground rivers and pools, but she hadn’t thought she’d run into them in Antarctica. She first thought  _ I wonder if Chaldea could use it for a natural hot spring, _ and then,  _ I wonder how far below Chaldea we are now. _

For a moment she tried to envision the distance they had traveled. Tried to think about how many thousands of tons of rock and ice they were under, how many miles of tunnel they had traversed. Tried to think about how long they had been down here. It felt like hours and days at the same time.  Even she might have felt a little daunted at the thought of the weight of all the mountains that they had burrowed under by now.

But then her flashlight’s beam illuminated a vast aperture, and she rushed breathlessly forward, into the most magnificent place she had ever seen.

The s culpted caves of  the Ajanta cave temples  h ad found their match . 

Because Helena could tell just by feeling, by some deep knowledge vested in her by her Caster class, that this new room was a temple’s antechamber, a vestibule on a scale not built for human worship. A smile cracked her face in half and she felt for the first time that she truly understood what those mad Tibetan manuscripts and forbidden scrolls had spoken of, that a curious mystic truly could go _mad from revelation._ The reverence of a devout Catholic in the Vatican itself must not be this overwhelming, and Helena didn’t even have any way to discover this temple’s faith. She still felt its builders’ devotion. 

The room was dark, and huge, even huger than the forest of spires and the hall of the great city above had been, carved of cyclopean blocks that must have been laid by creatures both intelligent and strong. And more than any of the curious striations or flowstone formations of the upper caves, the columns and ceilings and even the floor looked organic, animated. Helena had once in her travels taken a certain drug and seen the visible world light up with untold colors and endless eyes, ever-shifting and prismatic, and it had been grotesquely beautiful. The carvings here were the same. No human culture or artistic movement could have conceived of them. They did not conform to any principles of design that any sane teacher would pass on in school, nor were they elegant and well-formed, but they made primal sense. In the same way that the corpse of an unknown sea creature, washed up on the beach, is recognized by the human eye as _something_ and distinguished from a heap of trash, there was a sense and an organization to these carvings. _Though that’s a morbid way to think about it._

The longer Helena looked at them, as she took one careful step and then another in the dim light, the more she made sense of their idiosyncrasies and thought she understood their visual language. She wasn’t an art critic, but she dabbled, and she thought she saw some  evolution of the scientific style they had seen upstairs. There was that same c ross-section  presentation , the same attention to detail. But the scale was so vast! Helena had once read of a Japanese artist who had completed a painting on a grain of rice and another across an entire city square. This temple gate felt as if he had done both at once.

It was a shame that this dimension with its untold marvels was simply passing through their world as a fluke. Helena hoped that it would remain a while, like the other Singularities, fading just slowly enough for her to bring Mr. Holmes and Tesla and Edison down here to take pictures; maybe even a real human team could venture down here, with the proper safeguards and equipment, so all these w onder s wouldn’t pass out of human consciousness forever. B ut e ven as she hoped it, she knew that none of it could come to pass. Chaldea was over. It was just a matter of days before the Mage’s Association came to shut off the machines that let her and her fellow Servants exist in the world.  A ll of their accomplishments would be shut down, boxed away, erased and never acknowledged, and Master herself would be vilified for every miraculous thing she had done. It was always that way. Every great thinker, every true explorer, was an outsider and a p ariah .

_ Thank you, O Root Race. _ The prayer rose to the front of Helena’s mind and she found herself whispering it to the ropy and squamous carvings of cold green stone.  _ Thank you for giving Chaldea one last adventure. Thank you for showing us one more magnificent other world. _

“ Let’s take a break here,” she said. When she looked back over her shoulder she saw she had been walking alone for a long time.

Abby was wandering along one of the walls, dragging her fingers across the curious carvings like any child might. Her small form was almost lost in the swirling patterns and the gloom, only her blonde hair and the white fur lining of her coat indicating where she was now.  Astolfo and Gilles were even further  away; they had stopped at the entrance as if barred from a ccess by an invisible wall.

“ Guys?”

Helena saw Astolfo shake his head—his long hair whipping around his face—and with a huff she admitted to herself that this was no distance to have a conversation, and hardly  a respectful place to  be shouting  either. She  crossed the vast blocks of the hall’s floor with the longest strides her slender legs could handle, apologizing to whatever gods or spirits might dwell past this entry hall as her steps echoed  loudly and curiously, as  though the space were bizarrely shaped .

Finally she was back to them. She hadn’t realized, in her reverie earlier, how  oddly shaped the room was. It wasn’t a box or a rectangle, as she might logically assume. But nor was it a completely wild and un-curated shape of nature. All she could tell, with her eyes and mind confused by the darkness and the peculiar  _ writhing _ quality of the carvings, was that, though she had walked in a straight line back to the boys, she couldn’t see Abby anymore.

But now that she could see Gilles she wasn’t thinking about Abby.

He was stony-faced and slick with sweat, and Helena remembered an impression she had gotten the first time she had ever met him in Chaldea’s halls; that he was an instant from shouting at any time. At that more peaceful time she was just thinking of his passion for Jeanne d’Arc. Now she worried he  would be volatile .  Astolfo’s pretty face was unusually grave too, the snaggletooth that poked past his lip giving him more of a ferocious look than it ever had. 

Helena remembered when Abby had first appeared, and how when she had emerged from her atelier  to see, she’d found that  Gilles had just vomited on the floor. Shouldn’t she have put aside her curiosity and her agitation and questioned that a little more, questioned what it was that could make a Heroic Spirit physically ill? Question ed how this little girl had manifested independently in their  secure Antarctic base , and how, in the same moment, Gilles had become so sick? Even if Abby hadn’t “done” anything specifically, wasn’t the Baron’s mental state more concerning in light of that fact? How stable had he ever been in the first place? Was it worth having his manpower and his mysterious magical book, or was he so much of a liability that it would have been better to leave him at  their home base with the Olcotts? Dammit, this was why she was a solo traveler.  Everyone who came along on her journeys should be able to fend for themselves. She didn’t have time to babysit—

_ Calm down, calm down, HPB. There’s no need to go and have a fit, or you’ll look even more like a child than you already do.  _ With that slightly annoying reminder, the fire went out of her, and only the concern was left.

“Baron,” she prompted.

“I won’t go further.”

“Well you can’t go back. Not on your own, not yet anyway.” She pressed past his protest. “Maybe with one of the Olcotts, if I can set up a summoning circle and bring one down here.” Already she doubted she could claim this space for her own magicks. The power radiating from the inner temple was already so great, it might overwhelm her energies before she could even connect to the H ierarchy . But she wouldn’t tell Gilles that. “What  are you worried about ?”

“That girl is a trap,” Gilles said.

“Hey,” Astolfo squeaked, but they spoke over him.

“Abby?”

“ She’s not what she seems. She told me herself. I’ve seen what she really is, and I was a fool to go this far. But I won’t go any further.  Can’t you see this is the gate of a living Hell?!”

“ I...can’t say that I agree with you, Baron.” Helena had learned from experience that it was impossible to argue with a Servant with Madness Enhancement.  And sometimes  that madness was insidious, less screaming and violence and more insisting that  _ only _ a full four-week quarantine could guarantee non-exposure to the common cough. B esides, her feelings were as irrational as his. She couldn’t explain the value  _ she _ found in these alien carvings to a man already convinced they were devilish.

Helena found herself glancing at Astolfo for a voice of reason, which she never could have thought would happen. Astolfo put a hand on Gilles’s broad shoulder, a serious and manly gesture that didn’t seem to fit his cute frame.

“I don’t wanna make a friend do something he doesn’t wanna do. I don’t think Abby is too bad for a witch, and I think this weird place looks kinda fun, but I understand if it’s icky.”

“ This place is changing her. The further you go, the more you’ll see,” Gilles muttered,  his voice hushed as if he didn’t want to be overheard . “You’ll see as I saw. You’ll change as I changed. When we reach our Master, we’ll be  like beasts, not men—if we can make it there at all. She told me of the things, the Sh—Sh—no, I can’t say it. Even in Prelati’s book, the rituals to call them up were buried in ciphers he did not teach me. Though I could have unlocked them myself, in time. In time.”

“Maybe we can say a nice little prayer to make ourselves feel better,” Astolfo said. “Even the Good Book has weird stuff in it, right, Gilles? Even if it makes you feel creepy, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. But it might be bad for you to try climbing up all that way by yourself!” He patted Gilles’s shoulder as if completely unbothered by his raving.

“Astolfo is right. I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. But I don’t want you making accusations about Abby.” Helena resisted the urge to look over her shoulder, to  keep an eye on Abby again. “I’m going to stay in here for a while, within view of the door. Wave me over again if you really want to leave. But Gilles—“ She fixed him with the sternest gaze she could, drawing herself  up to her full height of f our-and-a-half feet . “ Remember who we’re doing this for, okay? Remember why we’re here.”

She turned, and Astolfo followed after her. But he glanced back.

“Nice Gilles! Can your  priest-y  friend come with us,  even if you don’t ?”

Helena shivered and tried not to guess what that question might mean.

There were four great pillars in the center of the hall reaching up to an unseen ceiling. Each was etched with carvings that crawled up its sides like huge abyssal parasites and worms. Helena placed her bag heavily in the center of these four pillars and, cross-legged, began to draw up a magic circle of her own design. The Secret Doctrine fell open out of thin air and landed on the stone floor beside her, on just the page she wanted.

“The swift and the radiant One produces the seven Laya centres, against which none will prevail to the great day ‘Be-With-Us’, and seats the universe on these eternal foundations. So too I seat myself on this foundation of the Planet...hm.”

It was as she had thought; she couldn’t convert this space to her own. Nor would she want to, now that she could feel the very pulse of the leylines she was sitting on. This place was claimed by a Territory Master in its own way, a n ancient non-human and non-living one. Not that  it meant  the Territory Master was dead. Helena remembered that strangely poignant couplet she had read in the Chinese translation of the Necronomicon so long ago in Tibet, but that translated so neatly and perfectly into English:

_ That is not dead which can eternal lie, _

_ And with strange eons even death may die. _

What would rouse the Master of these halls? How deeply did it sleep?

Helena doubted she had the power to even make it flinch, even as a Servant. She drew up only the barest of energies from the frozen ground to tether herself, drawing most of it from Chaldea and their distant missing Master. In meditation, she could feel that Master really was truly not far from them, that the pulse of her magic circuits, though slow and chilled, was somewhere within the temple complex they’d paused on the threshold of. She didn’t know how it felt to be a Master. She didn’t even know how it felt to be a mundane human. But she hoped that wherever Master was, she was able to feel her Servants drawing near too.

_ We’re not far from you now. You’re a good kid. And I know, if you’re conscious right now, you’re being incredibly brave. _

The Territory Helena claimed for herself with these meager energies took the form of a  weathered tent with tasteful Indian patterns in warm colors,  like the home of a well-traveled a scetic. It was a suitable place to rest and meditate without worrying about wayward negative energies, though it would dissolve like tissue paper under a serious focused magical assault.  _ It won’t soothe the Baron’s fears like a good consecrated chapel would, and it won’t protect from a malignant witch if Abby really is one.  _ Helena wished, for what felt like the hundredth time, that she was better with difficult people, or at least that she had been able to pick her own traveling party.

She poked her head out of the tent’s front flap and smiled to see Astolfo standing there.

“So I can come in? Good! Nice! It looks real cozy!” He pushed right past and crawled in. “I’m gonna take another cat-nap, if that’s okay~ I’ve been having some real nice dreams lately!”

“Actually, I was hoping to take this time to tune everyone’s mana. If that’s alright with everyone…” She couldn’t see Gilles from here. He must still be at the entryway. “The atmosphere is going to be way denser past here. It wouldn’t hurt to make sure we’re all in our best condition.”

“ Yeah, it feels like it’s finally getting warm.  It’s  cozy, isn’t it?”

“That’s not what I meant by atmosphere, but you’re right. I even think I spied some lichens on those pillars.”

Helena thought she heard the soft tapping of shoes just outside, and looked out again to see Abby lingering at the outward edge of the pillars, as if wondering whether she was permitted to step inside the consecrated zone.  _ That’s right, magecraft does make her nervous. She  _ was _ at the very center of the Salem Witch Trials, poor girl. _ “Abby, you can come in, you know. It’s fine, it’s just a temporary camp I set up, like my workshop in the basement.”

“Thank you.” Abby ducked her head bashfully and scurried to the tent flap. “I do like the way your magic feels, Miss Helena. It feels like I’m ruining it by stepping in.”

“You’re not ruining it,” Helena assured her, but as Abby crawled into the tent, she caught a whiff of a sickening smell, like rotting rose petals had been mixed int o her customary incense sticks.  _ Is that just how Abby smells?  _ It was hardly enough to kick her out of the tent for, but Helena remembered the fetid organic stench of the totemic spells in the generator room. 

_ As a f _ _ oulness _ _ shall  _ _ ye _ _ know  _ _ T _ _ hem, _ the Necronomicon in that dusty Tibetan temple had said.

T he text had never been clear who ‘ T hey’ were. But the lines of the Necronomicon, more than any other text she had perused, had a tendency to rise to the top of the mind. They had a queer poeticism and truthfulness that transcended any language.

“ Astolfo is asleep again...” Abby said.

“Again?! I’ve never even met an animal that could go from chasing its own tail to falling asleep so fast!”

“Sleep is important.” Abby looked like she wanted to say more, but  instead, s he unbuttoned her coat to retrieve the stuffed bear inside and tucked it under Astolfo’s arm. As she did,  a  tear in the black fabric of her dress stretched wide and revealed pale skin beneath. Helena blushed with secondhand embarrassment.

“Oh, Abby, your dress...here, let’s  do your coat  back up, okay?” Helena fussed with her b uttons as A bby squirmed away, not realizing the extent of the damage. “I set up a little summoning circle, so I can get the supplies to fix it for you. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll cover you up.”

“No, no, it’s okay!” Abby let Helena b utton her  back into the coat that was too big for her, and her pale face was buried in white fur. “My clothes are made of mana just the same as yours. I can fix it. But, um.” She flushed. “I’m glad you noticed, Miss Helena. I’m glad you’re taking care of me.”

“Aw, Abby…” Helena tucked a wayward lock of blonde hair behind Abby’s ear. “I should have been checking in on you more all along. You’re really brave, you know? Thank you for helping us out. We couldn’t help Master without you.”  
“ U m...I  have  selfish reasons,  really ...I want to see Miss Ritsuka again, so...” Her eyes went wide and again she looked away, realizing her face was uncovered.

“I can see your eyes changed color. It’s fine. It’s not weird.”

“I’m not a witch,” Abby said.

“You can be all sorts of things and do magic. You don’t have to be a witch.”

“Like...like you, Miss Helena. You don’t draw your power from the devil, do you?”

Helena smiled at Abby’s curiosity. _She could make a great student of Theosophy someday!_ “Of course not! I draw my power from the font of wisdom and eternal Light, the spiritual Adepts who will bring humanity—“

“I knew it. Your magic is so wonderfully kind.” She pulled at a loose black dress thread from deep within the sleeve of her coat. “And, um, Miss Helena, magical power can also come straight from God, can’t it?” 

Helena was willing to forgive interruptions only if it came in the form of a thirst for knowledge. “Of course it can. What do you call a miracle? What do you call a minister, or a priest?”

“Or a priestess, right?”

“Or a priestess! Though Christians like you don’t have priestesses, right?”

“They should,” Abby said in a small voice. 

“They should,” Helena agreed. But before she could launch into a diatribe about her views on the role of the Christian leadership in the America of her native twentieth century,  a sound outside distracted her. And when she looked outside, Gilles was there.

He looked exhausted, as if traveling this far into the vestibule had taken every ounce of determination from him. And when he crawled into the tent, pressing himself against the wall as if the touch of his companions would be poison to him, his arms and legs were shaking. He curled against the t ent wall facing away from them and said nothing. There was no word of greeting and no acknowledgment of what he had done. Simply being here was enough.

“I want to tune everyone’s mana, while we’re here,” Helena said to the group, though only Abby seemed fully conscious to hear it. “You don’t have to do anything,  just let me touch you . I just want everyone in top shape from this point on.” Astolfo had already heard her anyway,  and t he technical details meant nothing to them. “ I’m going to go into a trance state, but I didn’t sense any magical traps or any lifeforms when I set this up here, so don’t worry about me.” 

There was no need to tell them about the dormant energy. Every leyline on Earth had had some kind of guardian spirit or phantasmal parasite before humanity had spread across its surface. 

“Okay,” Abby whispered. Her red eyes were rapt at the chance to watch Helena’s magic up close again.

Helena crossed her legs and closed her eyes. And gradually, she sank into the eternity of the all-embracing cosmos.


	13. Interlude: The Cult of the Crawling Ones

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter will make more sense when there's more context, but it's also definitely the chapter where you can most tell I wrote it during Nanowrimo lol

_In Past Ages, Times Immemorial_

Ruin has fallen upon your race.

Once, your kind spread across this whole continent, and across the entire southern hemisphere of this planet. Your kind has cultivated this world for its own use and made it lush and beautiful, populated with diverse and carefully-cultivated creatures. Dynasties and epochs of your kind have risen and fallen here, and you have studied much of their history, from the sailing to this promised planet on solar winds, to the great advancements in science made in the first cities under the sea, to the initial cultivation of the life that is now ingrained in this world’s land and sea. You have studied much of your people’s art history, and their military history, the wars against the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go and the people of Yith. Your kind’s accomplishments have been mighty and proud.

Centuries ago, the cold had begun to encroach. The great city, heart and soul of your civilization, is safe in the heart of a great vigorous jungle, and besides, it is too important, too spiritually significant to leave; but the other land cities have been gradually emptied out over the centuries, so that you yourself have no memory of anyone living there, and nor does anyone you know. They are skeletal necropoli now, already reclaimed by the thinning vegetation and the increasingly small and scrappy creatures of this world.

Most of you have moved to the underground sea now. This is a logical action considering the circumstances of the times, and one undertaken with great reverence; the river that feeds into the cavern sea is ancient and sacred and has carved out vast and beautiful tunnels beneath the City and its temples. Though worship now has become a matter of more or less public spectacle, with little spiritual component, the respect, and the value of the old tradition, is ingrained in your culture.

Although there is that large and growing sect—

That increasingly verbal and prominent cult who champion the worship of That Which is Beyond the Mountains—

The feared and abhorred mountains that, legend says, shot up all on their own, and which the ancient Pnakotic texts connect with Kadath in the Cold Waste—

But this is not a cold waste. These jungles are warm and pleasant.

Though they were once hot and stifling.

The change did _not_ come from those mountains.

The prayers of that decadent and blasphemous sect did _not_ cause the slow ruin of your whole race.

Such a thing would be absurd, and yet.

You have seen lightning seem to linger meaningfully upon some of those peaks during the pole’s long winter nights. As if it was called there.

You have seen an unexplained glow crown the mightiest of those sinister peaks, as if some magic were being worked there.

And yet, it is absurd to think that a book of fables from unknown eons ago would predict the becoming of a mythical place from the land of dreams.

The potent plateau which your race holds sacred cannot incubate such a sinister evil.

The Mi-Go, those ancient enemies of ages past, had whispered of their lord in darkness, the Haunter of the Dark, the Crawling Chaos of _Nyarlathotep_ , and his sinister influence upon this land with its unending jungle nights. But surely your brethren would not be so degenerate.

Although you do have fears, as everyone has fears. There are those, some of the oldest and wisest of your race, who say that the Shoggoths should not have been allowed to adapt to land-dwelling. Long ago there was an uprising of _too-clever_ Shoggoths, and though your rulers have emphasized that the new breed is not as intractable, you have your doubts.

The Shoggoths can only mimick your speech. They cannot form new sentences. They cannot think. So say the elders.

But you have observed in secret the Shoggoths that climb up from the underground sea. The ever-shifting, protean Shoggoths that always bubble with new eyes and new orifices, ever adapting to their surroundings, and you think: are they not thinking, deep within their protoplasm? Are they not observing all, with their many eyes?

You have heard a rumor too terrible to repeat. You can only think it to yourself, in the long and gradually colder nights.

There are those of your race who mingle with the Shoggoths.

That degenerate sect of your race, invoking in secret the name of Shub-Niggurath, has commanded with hypnosis the land-adapted Shoggoths to take forms similar to that of your race, and performs mad dances with them under the full and new moons. The tossing of their five-pointed heads and the whirling whipping frenzy of their branched tentacles and wide-flung wings must be terrible and beautiful to see against the backdrop of those looming distant mountains of madness. What secret delights have those degenerates tasted? What boons has Shub-Niggurath granted to them? What forbidden fruits, what joys and delights can the shifting Shoggoths blessed by that great dark Mother show to a race growing as cold and as sterile as the mighty slopes of the city they cling to?

Secretly you think it is no wonder to wish to see. It is not so odd or unnatural to be curious, especially not as curiosity is one of the greatest qualities your race possesses.

At night, you stand in your sleeping alcove, and the howling wind through the distant purple line of those mountains seems to speak in your own piping language, though hollow and odd, like the voices of those mindless Shoggoths. You wish to sink into the warm and all-embracing depths of the sunless sea, so those mountains will hold no sway over you any longer.

Before long, all will sink with the Shoggoths to those watery depths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> btw yes I have noticed that there's some weird breaks in the middle of words sometimes, but I don't have any way to fix it? When I go into editing mode, they all disappear, so I can't close them. I'm sorry about that.


	14. Resonance of Light

_ Caster/Helena Blavatsky _

“Welcome back, Upasika.” Master Kuthumi.

“Thank you, my Masters.”

“We thought we had lost you to strange dreams.” Master Morya.

“It’ll take more than that to distract me.” Helena wiped her brow with her white sleeve, though of course within her mind-space, she had no sweat, nor any physical form at all. “Some abandoned nightmare like that could get to a lesser mage, but I hope you don’t think I’m so easily corrupted!”

Her Masters glanced at each other, and though to the outside eye they would have looked i mpassive beneath their turbans and thick beards, Helena knew they were faintly amused. And yet, they did not doubt her. They just treasured this boastful playacting.

“We have nothing but faith in your abilities, Upasika. And yet we fear regardless.”

“I know...I know,” she sighed. “And I understand your fear. The energies are thick down here. You felt them. You know.”

“We warded ourselves as best we could. Your connection to us, for the first time, seemed to become a liability. Not that that means we’re leaving you,” Master Kuthumi said, preempting her alarm. “Even if you were to traverse the very Darkness of the Outside we would protect you, child.”

“ Nevertheless, you must draw every power you have to yourself before you cross the point of no return. You are wise. You sense well the dangers around you. You understand they come from every ancient stony form and every one of your very companions. A djustment of their etheric forms is necessary.” Master Morya folded his arms within his robe. “The Hierarchy will resonate with you. Begin the process of tuning, Helena.”

And so, upon the shining staircase that marched all the way to the realm of Venus, to the very throne of the Ancient of Days, that f ountainhead of light and goodness that was Sanat Kumara, Helena made gestures she had learned in mystic Tibet and pronounced the sacred syllable of _ om _ .

All the Mahatmas took up the chant. Morya, Kuthumi, and every one of those  forerunners  who had ascended to A kasha , all behind Helena, all humming, all backing her up.

If her magecraft was a self-hypnosis it was a deeply powerful one. Helena felt the vibrations tune her spiritual body til every one of her quantum particles was vibrating to that same sacred note.

With that resonance carried through all of her form, she reached out one finger to touch her nearest Servant companion.

–

She had not expected Astolfo’s dreams to feel like this.

She had expected green and rolling hills, white-walled castles, proud horses, French paladins—had expected to smell grass and sweat and wine and roast meat and the press of adoring countrymen. Or maybe, considering what she had heard of his odd travels, she had expected clear skies and wide expanses, distant vistas of other countries seen from the back of a hippogriff. Heroic Spirits rarely dreamed of things beyond their ken, and usually saw their own pasts and legends only. They were creatures of tale and fable, after all. 

But touching upon Astolfo’s pleasant dreams, as she laid a finger on his spirit, she smelled the heady scent of incense.

Jasmine and sandalwood. Small-flowered trees and magnificent lotus blossoms. The golden glow of a singing river at sunset on a warm summer night.  Helena was reminded of India, the homeland of her soul.

_ Where are you right now? _

It was easy to resonate with him, easy to tune him to her frequency, but she was perplexed as she meditated with him all the same. As she drew close to his sleeping soul, she thought she heard the conversation of distant voices, the song of chanting priests, the bell-like chirping of tiny birds. 

_ I wonder if he’ll remember it when he wakes up.  _ Helena herself almost wanted to curl up and have dreams of travels along the river Ganges, of her twilight days in British India. Everything had been falling apart around her ever so slowly, but she had tried to cling to it as best she could.

Did Astolfo know how that felt?

Did he sleep and have these dreams because he wanted to be somewhere warm, instead of in this dark sepulcher beneath Chaldea?

Maybe he just liked to nap.

Reluctantly, Helena turned her attention to her next companion.

–

Gilles was not asleep. Helena felt him flinch as her finger brushed his forehead, but she put forth the most positive vibrations she could to put him at ease.

Their magics were fundamentally incapable. Her origin was light, the East, knowledge and harmony. He was a creature of Christianity first and foremost, inflexible and dogmatic, demanding and damning. Even as he had fled into darker paths, first butchered alchemy and devil-worship, then nameless faiths that were more ancient than mankind, that framework had pursued him, even to his end. Helena was fundamentally incompatible with him. She would never be able to deal with that way of thinking.

Right now his energies were a tangled mess. It almost made her angry to touch it. There was anger in him too, choked anger buried in waves of guilt and confusion. And his Saint Graph was corroded. It was tarnished and graffiti-ed, edited up and cobbled together like someone had been messing with it. She had never seen anything like this. The Alter Egos that had been programmed by BB might not be as messed up as this. There were—metaphorically speaking—fingerprints all over him, the small marks of clever and mischievous hands. Helena felt the presence of another mage, and felt unwelcome.

Deep beneath his spirit’s surface dwelled the mana furnace of that curious book. But she wouldn’t touch it now. She sensed it was too integral to him,  the keystone that kept his personality together. If it were removed, the madness would pour forth.

Helena had met that other Gilles, and she didn’t want to be traveling with him. It wasn’t worth it.

S he  patched up the mess as best she could, and decided it would hold for now.

–

Abby was awake and waiting for her. Helena felt her lean into the touch, and felt the chill of her skin as she touched her bare forehead. 

Helena almost imagined that A bby’s mind opened up to accept her. H er spirit was so placid, so welcoming, that  her felt herself falling in.

It was as unsettling as it was easy. A girl of Abby’s m agical inexperience should not be able to  consciously pull away the edges of her spirit like this and  invite Helena in. She should be a  chaotic open book, teeming with anxiety, excitement, and adolescent angst. Instead Helena felt the still of the tomb,  and a distant, deliberate watchfulness.

The texture of Abby’s spirit was terrifying, and Helena did not feel terror blindly. She was not, she told herself, the kind of person who feared what she did not understand; she was not someone who fled gibbering from the mighty and unknowable into the darkness of ignorance. She was a light of knowledge. She was an explorer and an illuminator of the dark.

But touching upon Abby’s spirit was like opening the door of a closet and walking into the expanse of all of space.

Helena tethered herself as quickly as she could to the physical realm.  _ The floor beneath me is cold. My ribbons tug at my hair. My companions breathe in the dark. The tent keeps us all close.  _ All the sensations she tuned out when she meditated, she now brought to the fore of her mind, anchoring her in the reality of the now,  keeping her from being irrevocably lost in the darkness of Abigail Williams.

_ That girl is not a girl. That girl is a vessel. No, the thing she’s holding is too big to be contained within her. She is a gateway. She is a  _ _ medium _ _. _ Helena  finally  understood. In the same way that  some  other Heroic Spirits were allowed to borrow the powers of their patron gods, Abby had traveled here and kept pace with her companions here by the benevolence of Something.

And what was that Something?

S he remembered the Mahatmas’ dark whispers of a Being from the great Outer Dark between Breaths.

An existence outside the universe, watching it take form and collapse, reinvent itself and die, an ongoing presence observing and watching again and again—

Could such an incomprehensible thing be?

Helena gave up on even trying to tune Abby to her frequency. If something was not in the Secret Doctrine, then she, as a Servant and as a student, could have nothing to do with it. She withdrew and arose from her trance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sometimes I feel like I understand Nasuverse magic and sometimes I don't, but when I write Helena I get to use that utter confusion to my ambiguous advantage
> 
> Helena: [reads Nasuverse lore] yeah I guess I KIND of buy that
> 
> anyway if you like to read about hermeticism and pretend you understand it then you already kind of get how the Nasuverse works, which is probably why I glommed onto this franchise so fast
> 
> if you also like anime bullshit and pretending you understand old books, hit me up at mgroach#2311 to complain about how FGO wrote Bradamante


	15. To the Stygian Sunless Sea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No chapter last week bc of ye old Post-Christmas Depression but now we're back in business!!
> 
> The Gilles's Sanity train is leaving the station, all aboard

_ Saber/Gilles de Rais _

Gilles had not liked how Madame Blavatsky’s touch had felt.

He did not like the gentle brush of a small hand, and the way his spirit vibrated at it, like she had done something to him.

She _had_ done something to him.

He only hoped that she did not _see_ him.

He curled up against the tent wall with his coat’s hood pulled up and shivered, until he remembered himself and remembered where he was. He had to maintain a little dignity, here on a mission with his fellow Servants. He was, for the time being, that celebrated Marshal of France. He could still access those memories. They weren’t burned away from him yet to reveal the monster beneath.

So he sat upright in the warm dyed-linen tent. He recalled those memories that made him so proud, while Madame Blavatsky continued her spiritual work.

The march of his troops across the green rolling fields of France, the noonday sun shining upon their armor.

The colorful attire of the courtiers, and how all had parted when that lowly Maid strode forward, and demanded an audience with t he Dauphin; they had played a cruel joke on her, and hid the heir among the nobles, as if to test her divine knowledge.

The secret smile she had seemed to impart to only him as she saw his face in the crowd. He had surely imagined it, how she had sensed his doubt, and glanced at him, as if to say: I am all that I claim. Watch as I prove it, and grow passionate in your faith.

The memory of that triumphant moment still burned true for him. He wasn’t fully tainted yet.

The group’s rest in the tent wasn’t too long, but it seemed shorter still for Gilles’s reluctance to move on. The vague time limit of “the full moon” meant nothing to him, as he was sure it had meant nothing to Abby. He looped his hand through the rosary in his pocket, though he had long since given up faith that it would save him.

For the last time before he stepped out of the tent, he savored his bright and shining memories of traveling with Jeanne. Surely they would corrode away to nothingness in the depths of Hell.

“Astolfo, you awake?” Blavatsky called back into the tent.

“Of course! It’s one of my many useful talents to be able to sleep, wake up! Sleep, wake up! Now I’m all thrusters one hundred percent!” And Astolfo burst out of the tent all fluffy hair and smiles. His momentum carried him out of Blavatsky’s territory, but Gilles wasn’t quite so daring yet.

“It’s all thanks to my mana tuning.” Blavatsky nodded proudly. “I have many strengths as a guru—say thank you to the Mahatmas!”

“I didn’t like what you did, Miss Helena.” Abby emerged soon after Astolfo, her voice a little sullen. “It felt rude and bad, to try to touch my soul.”

Gilles glanced down at her despite himself, and prickled at the sight of her red, devilish eyes. She did not smile back at him like the soft-hearted and sweet girl he had thought she was, only stared at him, unblinking and unpretending, until Astolfo’s antics made her break her gaze.

“ G ood morning, creepy pillars! Good morning, pretty carvings! Good morning, stylish mysterious priest!”

As far as Gilles knew, there were only the four of them here. And yet, for the second time, Astolfo had mentioned the presence of a priest. 

Prelati had studied as a priest. And surely he had been ordained as well into even deeper and madder faiths.

No. He wouldn’t think on it. It was foolish to read into the ravings of  such  a mad clown.

“Well then, shall we proceed?” Blavatsky asked brightly. “I hope everyone has their wits about them. The Mahatmas told me that we’re coming into the thick of it now!”

“I think it’ll be pretty exciting. There’ll be a lot for you to look at, Miss Helena. Astolfo. Baron.” Abby trotted forward and looked coquettishly over her shoulder for everyone to follow.

_I’m excited for us to see it too,_ Prelati seemed to say, into Gilles’s ear. _Shall we hold hands?_

Gilles only held tighter to his rosary.

At the far end of that curiously-shaped antechamber, a huge black void of a doorway yawned. The darkness within was oppressive, alarming. Gilles hated to walk toward it, felt like they were being drawn in. In fact, the blackness seemed so pitch that it seemed to radiate out towards them like light, or billow forth like smoke.

At one point huge doors had held the blackness at bay, but now they were sprung open, curiously and abstractly carved like the doors of alien cathedrals.

The party paused at those doors, paused on the threshold of that pressuring and pervasive black. Their flashlights and Blavatsky’s lights did nothing to illuminate the ground beyond. It could be level, or could descend into stairs. Or it could simply be a pit that stretched to the very bottom of the Earth.

“I almost feel like I understand them,” Blavatsky was saying, as if to herself. “But I don’t like them.”

“My uncle thinks they’re an especially barbaric race,” Abby agreed. “Even if they aren’t as bad as the purebred ones.”

“All I see is squiggles,” Astolfo said.

Gilles silently agreed.

“Not like those cool statues of the guys upstairs.”

That was less easy to agree with.

“You have to look for the intention,” Abby informed them. Maybe her revelation to Gilles had emboldened her. She was less shy with her mad knowledge now. “Look for the squiggles that seem to be doing something. Those are the ones who are Sh—the ones who are alive, and not just background decoration.”

Astolfo squinted, and Blavatsky, at the other door, squinted as well. She was sketching in a leather-bound notepad she seemed to have pulled out of nowhere.

“They’re not very good drawers, huh?” Astolfo said.

_I don’t know. They have a certain expressive quality,_ Prelati said. _I could see you selling a small villa to get your hands on one of these._

“This wood is really old,” Blavatsky muttered. “Like what kind of grain even is this?”

They lingered at the door for just long enough that their collective silence became pressing.

“We’re procrastinating, aren’t we?” Astolfo said.

“ If no one else will go first, I will,” Abby said. That n onchalance  was more demon than girl. How unlike the child who had hugged her toy bear while she confided in him. That toy bear was tucked into her coat now.  The affectation of innocence  it provided was  n o longer needed.

“ No, Abby. Let me.” Blavatsky shook her hair back from her face and p ushed past Abby , striding into the dark.

And disappearing from view with a sharp cry.

The knight in Gilles won out over the coward and he rushed forward to see what had happened, but Madame Blavatsky’s voice already echoed, though muffled, up out of the depths.

“It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s just a step. Well, it’s a big step. You guys might want to feel your way. But, um, your eyes will adjust, I’m bringing up the brightness on my mini-Kumaras too...I just can’t believe this happened twice...” She grumbled good-naturedly and Gilles let out a small huff of relief.

“Nice Gilles, will you carry us down the step?” Astolfo asked, clinging to his side.

“Yes, will you?” Abby echoed.

“Why do you want me to carry you so much?! Sir Astolfo, you’re perfectly capable...Abby as well.” He hardly wanted to touch her, in particular.

“Skinship is important,” Astolfo said, as if that explained anything.

It was hardly a compelling argument, but he did end up carrying Astolfo towards the step, if not down it, in a sort of one-armed compromise between a princess carry and the classic “sack of potatoes”. Abby stayed close by his side, her silence heavy.

It surely could not have been his imagination that the darkness truly grew more pitch around him the instant he stepped into it. It even seemed to deafen sound. Some magic was at work here, a primal magic not cast by any human or sentient mage, a magic that his own pitiful Saber skills would do nothing to ward against. He almost felt that he had been plunged underwater.

“Okay, lower him down,” Helena urged. Gilles lowered Astolfo into her slender, barely visible arms, as if they were performing the rescue of a stranded cat instead of the transfer of a perfectly capable Paladin.

“Yaaay! Thanks a bunch, I already think I can see down here—ooh.” Astolfo’s voice cut off in a hushed whisper, though Gilles could not imagine what he had seen.

“Okay. Abby?” Blavatsky’s voice called from beneath Gilles’s feet.

“I won’t carry Abby,” he almost said, but thankfully, she spoke first.

“I can get down by myself.” Abby sat on the edge of the step, instantly disappearing from Gilles’s sight by sinking out of it.

“Okay. There we go, I’ve got you!” For the second time Blavatsky reliably assisted someone her own weight and height, and Gilles was left to judge the distance himself.

He hoped no one’s eyes had adjusted to the new darkness too well as he c lambered none-too-gracefully down.

He estimated that the drop must have been about six feet, or somewhere otherwise close to his own height. As his feet hit the ground, someone patted his arm and side as if feeling him to be sure he was there. Light did not carry easily in this unnatural darkness, it seemed. He could see Blavatsky’s lights, but at first they illuminated nothing but themselves. Gradually he was able to see the faint outlines of her clever and friendly face, and he was glad. He hated the idea of stumbling and groping in the blackness while his eyes gazed and bulged wildly in search of light.

“We’re all here,” she said, satisfied.

“There’s another step,” Abby’s voice called from none too far away. 

“We’re on a staircase! A staircase for big legs!” Astolfo’s voice was even further away, echoing up from the blackness. “First one to the bottom wins~ Not that I know how far down that is!”

“Don’t you dare,” Blavatsky said.

Together, in silence, the four of them helped each other down each step of the huge stone staircase. Gilles could s till barely see past his face , and so the time passed in dreamy flashes. They were in a black, humid void that smelled increasingly r ank as they proceeded ever downward. S ometimes isolated body parts passed before his vision: Blavatsky’s white sleeve. Astolfo’s booted foot. Abby’s bare and bony knees. And sometimes, though he knew that person was not there, he thought he saw their flashlight beams illuminate in faint flashes the face of Prelati.

Abby was humming to herself, and Gilles did not know the tune from his own life but he knew inherently that it was a hymn. It angered him that she would hum sacred music while being a blasphemy herself, but no one would speak. He certainly had nothing to say. So he was left alone in the dark with her reedy and girlish humming voice.

The further down they went the grimier the steps became. He couldn’t see well enough to be able to tell what it was that was fouling his hands, only that it was slimy and it gave in to his touch. Blavatsky finally let out a massive “euugh!” after putting her hand through something particularly foul, and demanded they stop for a moment.

“It’s a lichen! Or a slime mold, or a...look I’m not a biologist, I just know I hate it!” Her voice cracked as she shook her arm in the dim light, trying to clean it, and it was both comical and alarming. Abby laughed dryly. “I can’t take it anymore, geez, ugh!” She took in a deep breath but coughed hard on the fetid smell. “I suppose it’s neat that they grow down here in Antarctica.”

“It’s almost kind of warm, with how we’ve been climbing,” Abby said.

“Are you tired? I can give you a piggyback ride!” Astolfo said. Gilles thought he could see his pink hair on the step below the rest of the group.

“No, but maybe you could hold my coat if you don’t mind.”

“Abby, I think you should keep it on,” Helena said. 

The silence that passed between the two was brief but heavy. Gilles continued to clamber downward, finding Astolfo’s clasped-together hands as a foothold. The rocks really were slippery. He even thought some of them glowed faintly after the lights passed over them, as if they retained its memory. Maybe it was his eyes adjusting as he began to see patches of color, lichenous and fungal sickly growths. Or maybe he was imagining them. 

Like a fool, he looked back up the way he had came. And it took his breath away.

The steps they had climbed down seemed impossibly steep, jutting sharply upward to the vast door he could no longer see. The darkness around them was not a void as he had foolishly imagined, but teeming with sickeningly odd and alien life. Everything was fungal, wet, fibrous, and flabby, fleshy shelves of moist jutting mushrooms, fuzzy molds and creeping slimes that clung to clefts in the rock. They were of every color, but always the most sickly hues, crowding and cooperating and languishing clammy and close in the sepulchral dark. A visual cacophony of decomposition and foulness. And it had been all around them all the time. Gilles had the mad thought that they were climbing down a huge diseased throat, warm and wet and living as it was, and it made him want to scream, made him want to climb all the way back up to the sterile and dead coldness, made him want to dash Abby’s head upon the rocks. _It’s her fault._ He thought he heard her giggle as she hummed, but in the next moment knew he had imagined it. He thought he felt a warm dry hand interlace its fingers with his and give his hand a comforting squeeze. A fine time for encouragement. He clung to it, not knowing whose hand it was.

There was a faint roaring and it wasn’t in his ears.

“Water,” Blavatsky said. “Is there a river down here?”

“ No, it’s a sea. It’s the huge underground sea they always feared.” Abby turned from somber to mischievous. “When we get t o it , we should take a bath to wash off the slime. If we don’t, it’ll crawl into our ears and take over our brains. It might be a little alive, you know.”

“If it took over my brain, it would just get too confused and die,” Astolfo said, and Gilles was sure everyone silently agreed with him.

The staircase did not give any warning when it ended, and instead of a next step there was black, still water. Gilles plunged a foot into it foolishly—Abby pulled him back to solid ground.

Had it been her hand he had been holding?

“We’re going right,” Helena said. “Watch the drop.”

“Thank you,” Gilles said belatedly.

They walked single file,  a  damp wall blooming with lichen on one side, and on the other, a steep drop into still dark water. Despite the fact that it never moved, Gilles did not doubt that within its  nighted depth s , life teemed .  There were creatures who did not need the sun to live, creatures that thrived in blind eternal dark. Like the penguins. Gilles shivered to think of them, still trapped in their oubliette, squirming and flopping over each other and forever straining up to freedom they would never gain, until they were snatched away by something from the deep darkness they were now descending to.  What creatures farmed them? What kind of sunken cities did they build in the lightless depths, what kind of  membranous and fleshy forms did they take? When he closed his eyes he thought he saw them. He had seen them before. No, that was a memory from later years. He hadn’t seen them yet.

After some silent and uneasy travel, the outcropping on which they had been traveling began to dip, and the angle of their descent started to tend toward the water. Everyone’s pace slowed as they cautiously tried not to stumble into it. But finally Astolfo’s boots sloshed through it.

“C-c-cold,” he squeaked. But with a bravery or lack of sense that Gilles had come to expect from the intrepid Paladin, he kept going, shivering exaggeratedly so that the water lapped in great waves at everyone’s feet. “Guys~ It’s seriously so cold, it’s like jumping in a swimming pool~”

“If it’s that cold, then come back,” Blavatsky called. Still, the sound of Astolfo’s clumsy wading, and the theatrical chattering of his teeth as he went, reached them alarmingly well.

“What if he falls in a hole?” Abby asked. “Or if it’s deeper than he expected...”

“I can swim!” Astolfo insisted. Then, after a moment, he added, “...or at least I think I can?”

“For Heaven’s sake.” Gilles waded in after him. It certainly was cold, but not as cold as he had expected from Astolfo’s theatricality. One step at a time, he tested the waters, following Astolfo, just a few steps behind; and, when Astolfo’s head plunged underwater, lifting him by the scruff of his neck so he didn’t go under.

“I don’t believe Servants even need to breathe,” Gilles chided him as they finally both scrambled to the shore on the opposite side. It was sandy and the ridiculous fur-lined coats they had donned were bogged down with foul-smelling water.

“I love having a body and Chaldea gave me one so I’m never going into spiritual form. So there!” Astolfo surely stuck his tongue out at the end of the sentence, but Gilles didn’t care to look at him for it. He was gauging the distance they had crossed and finding that it was farther than he had expected. Blavatsky and Abby were so small they looked like figurines posing in a sea of blackness.

“It’s too deep for you to wade,” Gilles called, “but it only comes up to my chest.”

“What?” Blavatsky called back.

Gilles sighed and took a few steps into the murk, his coat abandoned on the shore. “Right about here where I’m standing is the deepest part.”

Madame Blavatsky and Abby conferred amongst themselves. Gilles strained to hear but couldn’t make out their words.

“ Abby is scared. I can carry us with my magic, but...Baron, can you walk back over with us?”

As much as he loathed to wade through the shallows of a mysterious subterranean sea the depths of which were unknown to him, he had done it once, and though the distance looked long, it traversed easily, and so already he was traveling back with a sigh.

He already felt that he was carrying a weight on his back. Prelati was murmuring in his ear.

_This must be that famous Gilles de Rais-brand charm that makes women and children trust you despite everything~ Man, I never understood it,_ he said with a soft awe and reverence. _You’d smile, and even in the depths of our charnel house those urchins would still believe they were about to be saved_. Gilles could only close his eyes and grit his teeth so he would not protest; the words of his friend and mentor could not be stopped even if he stopped up his ears. They emanated from within his own brain. _Now that girl is begging to jump into your arms. What will you do? I wonder how many sacrifices her life is worth. In exchange for that soul, the dark demon god of the sunken city might even be able to raise up a fresh Jeanne._

Before he realized it, the water was down to his thighs, then his knees. Blavatsky was floating gently above the ground, and Abby clung to her coat with one hand, her feet dangling in the air and her face pale and tense.

“Baron, just let me hold onto your shoulder,” she begged, seeming a little self-conscious, as if embarrassed to ask something so childish. But he saw the artifice of it. He saw the color of her eyes, dark red and slitted like a strange lizard’s. How did Blavatsky not see it?

When he looked to her face, she was already looking ahead, her eyes practically sparkling with a desire to forge ahead. Damned mystic. In her search for an esoteric truth she would even cast herself into Hell, and all her followers with her—

Blavatsky started to tread carefully across the surface of the water, her boots never quite making contact. Abby’s feet dangled like a hanged man’s at the gallows.

God, but her little fingers dug into him like knives. It made his skin clammy and his heart pound with the memory of so many other little fingers that had feebly clasped for his face or his throat, pleading for mercy or struggling to fight. The water was rising and Blavatsky moved so slow, every step was in slow motion, he felt as if he were weighed down not by water but by the grip of so many little hands. 

Abby giggled. It was a wicked sound.

When he glanced at her, her face was twisted up into a smile that no child could make, too wide, too cruel, and the teeth too pointed. There was no hope of it being his imagination. He had already accepted to himself the truth of what she was. If he looked down at her feet now he was sure he would see those elongated foot-paws.

The shore was too far still. Every second was torture. Her hand on his shoulder seemed to burn him.

Finally the bank sloped upward and it was just one more good stride to the shore, and he could not take it anymore. He wrenched her off of him and, with no pretensions of delicacy, t ossed her to the ground.

The relief he felt at being free from her negated any guilt he would have felt at the look of shock on her face. And he would not look up to acknowledge the shock on Astolfo or Madame Blavatsky’s faces either. For all their quirks of intuition and Eastern wisdom, they could not know what he knew.

Horribly, Abby’s betrayed expression mutated before his eyes into languid amusement.

“That hurt, you know?” She sat up, and drew her oversized coat around her shoulders again: it had slipped, and he saw her bare shoulder. Her dress was in tatters. Her disguise must be more difficult to maintain down here, so close to her ultimate goal. “Baron de Rais, was I clinging to you too hard? You could have told me.”

He couldn’t get his tight throat to form any words. They were in darkness, but he could see only red.

“Is my touch that disgusting? Or were you just looking for an excuse? You must be really mad at me.”

Her apologetic glance was just an act for the others’ benefit, like everything else she did. Hoarsely he finally eked out some words.

“Just show yourself. Your design is almost complete. Why hide? Just let them see what I’ve been seeing, unveil yourself.”

When she did not immediately comply, his arm darted out and he grabbed her by the front of that too-big coat, the last curtain she hid her form behind. He was almost surprised, like his arm had acted on its own.

“Tell them what you are! Go on, tell them!”

She was struck silent with fear at first, or pretending to be. But then she said it:

“It’s alright. You’re just mad. You’re insensible.” 

Whether she was trying to calm him or mock him, he could barely tell. At first.

As she kept speaking—as he foolishly allowed her to keep speaking—her point became clear.

“I know the Devil speaks to you, Baron.” Her pale face was unsmiling. “He’s been at your back all along. My Father told me. He told me  what kind of a lord you were.” She spoke the words that were taboo, and though her voice was airy, breathy, dreamy, it echoed throughout the cave. “I know what you did to the blonde children.” She spoke the next sentence sweetly, deliberately. “You want to kill me, don’t you?”

She lolled her head back to expose her throat, her eyes glazed over and uncaring, as if inviting him, or as if imitating a child already dead.

But he could not see a child in that moment.

He only saw a grey-skinned, red-eyed g houl , leering at him, seeing through him, possessing the body of the girl he had taught the rosary to, the girl who had been so brave and dignified despite the fear  that  he had been able to  see through her bravado.  That girl had never existed.

It was always like this. He could never have the ideal he wanted. Always it was crushed, driven to the dirt as God Himself laughed at the audacity. He could never have redemption. He could not even be allowed to strive for it. All was mockery. Gilles saw the omnipotent hatefulness of God sneering through this being, this girl-shaped _thing_ he had foolishly idealized, though he had known its shape all along.

He struck out.

In the aftermath of the slap, he felt the softness of her skin, and it did feel warm.

Maybe it was the emotion, or maybe the blow, that brought color to her cheeks.

Maybe it was the sheen of tears in her eyes that made him misjudge their color as blue.

He  just knew immediately it had been a mistake. She wasn’t a demoness, or a master witch; only a mischievous and awkward girl in possession of knowledge she had obtained from her bookish uncle, unsure how to best p acify a madman . He had been mad. He  _ was _ mad. He had never been in control of his faculties.  He had always seen evil when the only corrupted thing had been his mind. He had poisoned everything. It was all his fault.

He realized he was shouting all of these things at Abby’s back as she shed her coat and ran ahead of them, further into the damp abyss.

Prelati was laughing at him.


End file.
